This is a timely question, since the cast, which is indeed star-studded and Oscar-winning, will be in town this very afternoon. Expect traffic snarl ups on the Strip (we mean, in excess of the usual) around 3:30 p.m., when Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro, Kevin Kline, and Mary Steenburgen will attend a red-carpet event in front of the Bellagio fountains, where they'll receive the honorary Key to the City of Las Vegas, plus a Key to the Strip (did someone just invent that?) and the date will be declared "Last Vegas Day."
As to what we've heard about the movie, the answer is very little. Although it was filmed on location in Las Vegas (and Atlanta), it was all kept pretty much on the down-low, although there was a casting call for extras back in October, 2012, when the producers announced that they were looking for, among other things: "Hip and trendy nightclub types ... Jersey Shore type of guys (Italian and buff) ... celebrity lookalike or impersonators ... beautiful girls to be in a Wet T-Shirt contest ... a woman in her late 50s to early 60s (brown hair and brown eyes) for a featured scene with Robert De Niro (not involving the club scene or pool scene) ... jugglers ... people who paint themselves silver or gold, etc ... [and] down-scale types — really thin crack head-types, people missing teeth, and really overweight types to play gamblers at a downtown casino. We will need to take pictures of you in your bathing suit."
Toothless crackheads in bathing suits? Not even the Western allowed that! (Although, now that we come to think of it, we're pretty sure we saw that scene play out in real life -- minus the fat people, obviously -- at the Hard Rock when we were there for brunch on a Rehab Sunday pool party day a couple of years back, but we digress...) And, to come clean, that last sentence actually ends with: "... if you want to be in the pool scene", but the whole thing was so badly written (what you see above has actually been edited, just to do things like spell De Niro's name correctly) and cliché-ridden that we couldn't help ourselves. Perhaps there are QoD readers out there who answered this call? If so, could you buff Italian jugglers, overweight celebrity lookalikes, silver and gold people, and especially the middle-aged brown-haired woman, please drop us a line and give us the scoop? Thanks.
Last Vegas was actually being filmed on location at Caesars Palace at the same time as The Hangover Part III, but it was the latter that received all the local media coverage, not least because of dramatic, traffic-disrupting scenes, like people parachuting onto Fremont Street and the Strip. It was at the same time that Shania Twain made her dramatic entrance to Caesars on horseback, too, so not much attention was paid to those old, Academy Award-winning geezers, aside from a little mention by Robin Leach in the Las Vegas Sun at the time, simply informing us that the cast of Last Vegas was here. So, if you're hoping for tales of reality imitating fiction, with a drunk Morgan Freeman stealing Shania's horse and running amok on Fremont Street in a Big Bird costume, or Douglas and De Niro caught midnight skinny dipping with East European hookers in the Garden of the Gods, we're going to disappoint you. Either such things never happened, or else everyone who witnessed said incidents has since disappeared in the desert (we're inclined to think the former, and that any "down" time was most likely spent chowing down on some of De Niro buddy Chef Nobu's legendary sushi).
While Hangover III hogged the limelight during production (including plenty of reports of what restaurants and shows the cast members were spotted at), the movie pretty much tanked at the box office, garnering some scathing write-ups from the critics, like the reviewer for the Miami Herald, who wrote: "There’s exactly one good scene in all of The Hangover Part III, a hilarious bit of business halfway during the end credits that reminds you what made the original film so good. The rest of this odious, mean-spirited movie — the crassest cash-grab to come out of a Hollywood studio in recent memory — appropriates the title and the characters from the previous pictures and sends them on a would-be adventure involving gangsters, gold bars and that pinnacle of hilarity, decapitated giraffes."
Last Vegas, on the other hand, may have the last laugh, since the word on the street is that it's pretty hilarious. Clark County Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak has already declared that, "Last Vegas has the potential to be one of the greatest Las Vegas movies of all time," but we could of course make the point that any movie filmed here has that potential -- the question is, has he seen it? Or was that just wishful thinking? Or is he simply totally star-struck at the thought of hanging with the celebrity cast (he'll be there alongside Mayor Goodman, doling out keys and naming days)?
We're hoping it's the former, and the official trailer does look promising, but it looks like we'll have to wait until November 1 to see for ourselves. In the meantime, movie fans on imdb.comM are already dreaming up the sequel:
Now we really hope Last Vegas is a smash hit, because we totally want to see that sequel! For now, check out the official trailer and more at the official website, lastvegasmovie.com.
