Reception
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 37% of 104 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 5.1/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Stand Up Guys largely wastes its talented cast in a resolutely mediocre comedy hampered by messy direction and a perfunctory script." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 41 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.
Slant Magazine gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four:
Watching Christopher Walken, Al Pacino, and Alan Arkin sitting in a diner, talking about the old days, produces a certain kind of frisson, a comforting familiarity that springs from their collective decades of on-screen myth-making. Conversely, though, there's a profound sense of despair that stems from seeing the man who played Michael Corleone lying on a hospital bed with a pup-tent erection, leering at his doctor in a scene that feels ripped from a sub-Apatow VOD knockoff. Your mileage with Stand Up Guys will depend on how much despair you're willing to endure in order to get to the worthwhile stuff—scenes in which the rookie filmmakers get out of the way and let the veteran actors play off of each other.
Owen Gleiberman gave the film a grade of B− (on a scale of A+ to F), and concluded:
Directing his first dramatic feature, Fisher Stevens does his best to give these gravel-voiced legends room to strut their stuff. But that's the problem: The movie is too much of a wide-eyed, ramshackle homage to '70s-acting-class indulgence. It needed much more shape and snap. Still, when Alan Arkin joins the party as a dying colleague, his antics—at least once he gets behind the wheel of a stolen car—give the film a fuel injection. Stand Up Guys reminds you that these three are still way too good to collapse into shticky self-parody, even when they're in a movie that's practically begging them to.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times enjoyed the film, giving it three-and-a-half stars out of four, saying, "Apart from any objective ranking of the actors, Walken is a spice in any screenplay, and in 'Stand Up Guys,' there's room for at least as much spice as goulash. Director Fisher Stevens begins with a permissive screenplay by Noah Haidle that exists in no particular city, for no particular reason other than to give the actors the pleasure of riffing through more or less standard set-pieces."
Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle gave the film one of its most glowing reviews, saying that it contains the "best performance[s] in years" by both Pacino and Walken; as LaSalle puts it, the film is "difficult to talk about. Say it's a movie about old gangsters, and you immediately imagine the other person thinking, 'It's sentimental.' Mention a scene in which the old gangsters show up at a brothel, and a whole other set of cliches come to mind. But Stand Up Guys is different. It introduces standard movie tropes only to subvert them and broaden them and bring out their truth."
At the 70th Golden Globe Awards, the film was nominated for a Best Original Song for "Not Running Anymore" by Jon Bon Jovi.
