Metacritic reviews

Ideally, you want your action comedies to contain compelling action sequences and funny comedy. At the very least, it’s fair to expect one of the two. Despite a semi-compelling relationship at its core, “Old Guy” isn’t nearly as funny as it thinks it is, and its set pieces are quite flat by action standards.

There’s no snap to the dialogue, no thrill to a majority of the action, and the other characters played by Cooper Hoffman and Lucy Liu (and their relationships to Dolinski) make no lasting impression.

Old Guy is a rather careless take on the fusion of comedy and action genres, the kind of film that will throw around an acronym like “PSNI” in the middle of conversation and just assume an American sitting at home on their couch will deduce this stands for “Police Service of Northern Ireland.”

Old Guy looks the part of a classic, character-based action-thriller, but, ultimately, the script is far too flimsy for the film to coalesce into something interesting. It's too bad, as Waltz could almost certainly crush in one of these, given the right material.

Old Guy feels very of this moment in the fact that it looks good and has a good cast and yet can’t seem to deliver something that’s either entertaining or meaningful. But unlike so many of its peers, this one amazingly was not made by a streamer.

This is a warmed-over remix of crime comedy and thriller tropes, as awkwardly paced as it is murkily shot.

Beyond the stale plot and groaners that make up the dialogue, “Old Guy” suffers from haphazard pacing, as if every third scene was cut out in postproduction. Watching, one wonders who this movie is for — even within the target demographic stated in the title.

The film's dialogue is insincere and cookie-cutter, failing to deliver naturalistic character growth. And surmounting its inefficacy at simulating humanity is perhaps Old Guy's most glaring action movie sin: it's truly boring.

Old Guy, as is, is just a film about an old guy, free of complexity or nuance, coasting towards its formulaic conclusion.

What should be a plucky, whip-smart character-driven actioner about an elderly assassin fighting career obsolescence morphs into a dusty, no-stakes patchwork of clichés that shrugs off any resonance, let alone entertainment value.