Vincent is a drunk and grumpy war veteran who befriends a scrawny, yet mature, ten year old. Am I watching Gran Torino? Also, the ten year old boy is raised by a single mother trying to make ends meet and trying to gain custody over her son. Doesn’t this sound like Kramer Vs. Kramer? In addition to the curmudgeonly war veteran babysitting the precocious young boy, he is trying to scrape by at either the race track or by selling pharmaceuticals to pay his stripper/hooker girlfriend who just so happens to be pregnant. Now I feel like I’m watching an episode of Shameless.
The film, or bastardization of the aforementioned films and television shows, is St. Vincent, the flat directorial debut of Theodore Melfi. Marketed as a comedy based on the trailer and publicity, the film only gets a few giggles from the same gags repeated in the trailer. Despite a star-studded cast, the performances are stuck in the quicksand of typical Hollywood claptrap. At first glance, you would think the film would be a quirky, slice-of-life look at the generational gap between Bill Murray and his young protege, played by Jaeden Lieberher, in a manner similar to the writing of Wes Anderson, but the result is a film with cliche piled on after heart-string pulling cliche that it might as well be titled, “Not Another Oscar Movie.” The running time of the film is an hour and forty-two minutes, yet it drags on to the point where I thought my watch stopped.
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