When 17-year-old Ed Wallis is given a homework assignment from his teacher to ‘go talk to an old person’, he has little choice than try and see if his next door neighbor will help him out. Ed and his mother have just moved into the area to start a new life now that Ed’s dad has apparently abandoned them both for good. He does go through the motions of caring for his son, but does little beyond making empty promises during their occasional Skye calls which he never fulfills.
He and Ed sort of bond, as Ed needs some kind of a father figure in his life as he such a sensitive book nerd and so regularly gets bullied at school. He also wants to play football but lacks the initiative to get beyond the team trials and so he needs to ‘man up’. Ashby on the other hand, now fading fast physically, needs someone to ferry him around town for Doctor’s appointments and do odd errands.
Ashby plays at being a man of mystery and the arsenal of weapons that Ed discovers one day when snooping around his house would suggest some sort of violent past. When Ed pushes the point about their existence, Ashby admits that he has killed some 93 people in his ‘line of work’ but suddenly in a moment of unlikely self-examination he realises that his former bosses had used him to kill people who were not threats to national security at all, but just people they had personal grudges against. Now that he is dying and has nothing to lose Ashby decides to spend his last days settling scores against his ex-employers and raising his total of kills even higher.
Whilst this unlikely pair of ‘friends’ are traipsing all around town, Ed’s mother is making some very bad choices in trying to have some male company of her own. This side strand of the story sits ill at ease with the rest of the action especially as ‘Ma’ is uncomfortably played quite straight by the comic Sarah Silverman.
Ed’s only other hope of any happiness in this otherwise uneven comedy is a too-bright-for-her-own-good girl (played by Emma Roberts). By the time she makes her mind up about Ed, it’s a little too late. We know then that he could do so much better with someone not quite so superficial.
This is one of those movies that tries very hard at being something for everyone and in the end fails to really please anyone. It’s a mash up teen comedy, crime caper an coming of age story that is funny in parts but mostly never much more than mildly amusing. Shout out though to young Nat Wolff who plays Ed. Not such a standout-performance as he gave in ‘The Fault In Our Stars’ last year, but he continues to show what a really fine actor he is even when he is not required to stretch himself much as in this instance.
