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With: Nicolas Cage, Ashley Greene Khoury, Ron Perlman, Thalia Campbell, Jackie Earle Haley, Ernie Hudson, Grace Byers, Lynn Whitfield, Joel David Moore, Jordon Johnson-Hinds, Rick Fox, Ronnie James Hughes, Samantha Kaine
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Written by: Tim Brown
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Directed by: Tim Brown
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MPAA Rating: R for violence and pervasive language
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Running Time: 103
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Date: 09/15/2023
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The Retirement Plan (2023)
Stressed Drive
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
This Elmore Leonard-like action/crime caper is likable enough, thanks to its terrific cast and colorful characters, but after a while it starts to seem a little listless, lacking a certain snap.
Jimmy (Jordon Johnson-Hinds) steals a hard drive with mysterious but sensitive information on it. But the robbery goes badly, so he urges his wife Ashley (Ashley Greene Khoury) to get herself and their 11-year-old daughter Sarah (Thalia Campbell) out of town. Ashley puts Sarah — with the hard drive — on a plane to the Cayman Islands, where her estranged father Matt (Nicolas Cage) lives.
Psychotic crime lord Donny (Jackie Earle Haley) captures Jimmy and forces Ashley to go with two of his men to her father's place to retrieve his property. Unbeknownst to anyone, Matt is actually ex-special forces, and is not an easy man to subdue. After a fight, Donny's right-hand man Bobo (Ron Perlman) winds up with Sarah as a hostage. Matt vows not to let his newly-reformed family come to any harm.
The Retirement Plan starts off with a bang, using flash, freeze-frame title cards to introduce its many characters, and it feels like things are going to get exciting. Cage's Matt is promised as an unstoppable warrior, and Perlman's Bobo is an uncommonly gentle and educated criminal henchman. But the movie never really challenges them. There's hardly even any friction between the estranged father and daughter characters either, and when Bobo is forced to make a hard choice, he barely even takes a minute to decide.
The hard drive all the characters are after is the dictionary definition of a "MacGuffin," i.e. "an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot," and it has no real stakes. And the movie has a strange rhythm, often cutting away from scenes when it feels like they ought to keep going.
This batch of performers — as well as the warm, lazy Cayman Islands atmosphere — are welcome in any movie, and perhaps The Retirement Plan will make a decent enough late-night TV watch, but it could have used more zing.
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