When was the last time a Movie Star announced they were making their last movie? Or howabout this, when’s the last time anybody in Public announced they were doing their last anything? OK, Philip Roth, he announced he was done writing, and then at some point he announced he was done being interviewed about being done writing, because he was done. The only place it normally seems to stick is in sports, because usually there’s no way the Retiring Athlete is expected by anybody to be able to do whatever thing they were Pro at for very long anyway, but Robert Redford, who was a giant Movie Star, and became an accomplished award-winning director and a huge philanthropist of Film, has announced at the age of 82, that he has acted in his Last Movie.
What was Robert Redford’s last movie? Not including this new one, The Old Man & the Gun, the one that’s supposed to be his Official last movie, and opens up with more than one nod to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which was the movie that put him over as a Big Star, and that’s why he named his big Film Institute “Sundance”? What was his last movie before this, because this one was OK, and we’re gonna believe him when he says this is his Last Movie, but it’s not a terribly exciting Last Movie, and this flick is full of bank robberies? Redford plays a can’t-stop-won’t-stop elderly gentleman bank robber, but the robberies are nice and Gentlemanly, and it avoids the whole One Last Job cliche, except where the movie star himself is concerned?
What was Robert Redford’s true Last Job? Our Souls at Night (2017)? The Discovery (2017)? Pete’s Dragon (2016)? Truth (2015)? A Walk in the Woods (2015)? Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)? Holy shit, now that would have been a great Last Movie for Robert Redford, if they had done it right. Instead of that disposable evil government person part he walked through, they could have made him a really old Captain America! This is Robert Redford we’re talking about, he made two movies in a row with “The Great” in the title, The Great Gatsby and The Great Waldo Pepper! Yeah, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, that’s Robert Redford’s last movie, except he’s Captain America and the old version of him is a hero somehow, in the movie, and then they kill him, that’s perfect, the end.