This would be nothing at all without Bill Murray – and, quite frankly, even with him it isn’t an awful lot. But Murray’s natural freewheeling charm and star quality carry a rather formulaic and slushy picture. Well, it’s good to see him in a real starring, not supporting role. Murray plays Vince, a cantankerous, bad-tempered old guy who appears to blow whatever cash he has on being the boyfriend-cum-regular of a pregnant Russian stripper-cum-escort, played by Naomi Watts. Then he winds up doing some afterschool babysitting for the unhappy young son of his single-mom neighbour (Melissa McCarthy). As in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, that much-feted but now intensely unfashionable movie, Bill Murray knows how to shine as the bleary, cynical companion to a younger person dragooned by fate into being both his pupil and his accomplice, and who puts Murray back in touch with his own innocence. Inevitably, all the purely funny stuff is in the opening act, and easily the best gag resides in Murray’s very first speech. The rest is pretty sugary, leading to a huge lump-in-the-throat final speech. I found myself contrasting it with Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil, a film with a superficially similar premise but deeply different narrative direction.
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