COMEDY; 1hr 37min
STARRING: June Squibb, Fred Hechinger, Richard Roundtree, Clark Gregg, Parker Posey, Malcolm McDowell
Scoot! Squibb
At the impressive age of 93, Los Angeles grandmother and grande dame Thelma Post (Nebraska ’s Squibb, all kinds of awesome with 94 years under her own belt) is doing just fine despite certain frustrating limitations. There is the missing of her late husband, the daily arsenal of pills for the trademarks of time, the invisible weight of solitude in her cosy apartment and the vexing mysteries of modern technology. The underbelly of tech catches up with her in a sharply nasty way when Thelma is scammed of $10,000 by a caller who poses as her doting 24-year-old grandson Danny (Hechinger), alleging to have been arrested after an accident. (Hint: the perennially sinister McDowell is involved.)
While as concerned as anyone would be if their elderly mama got diddled,Thelma’s daughter Gail (Posey) and son-in-law Alan (Gregg) take a grin-and-bear-it view of the shady business that the lady herself doesn’t share. Thelma is a sight more feisty than her cuddlesome features and frail physicality suggest, besides which $10,000 is not nothing and she wants it back. With images of Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible mode as a template, she and her brother-in-arms, Ben (Roundtree), sharing Ben’s motorised, two-seater scooter, undertake their own seemingly impossible retrieval mission, inspired by first-time feature film-maker Josh Margolin’s 104-year-old grandma.
As capers go, this one is necessarily more cruisy than Cruise. Like it or not — and she emphatically does not — Thelma is 93, the testing reality of which slows her momentum even while inflaming her spirit. Squibb as Thelma is a badass to her bones. Stubbornly and fearlessly alive, she is in no way a woman to be trifled with, irrespective of the age deck stacked against her.
