LAST VEGAS: The Hangover on Viagra fails to rise to the occasion

LAST VEGAS is as shiny, glitzy, shallow and fake as its namesake city.
Both dangle tantalizing promises of fun and excitement that neither are able to deliver on.
Las Vegas can be a wonderful place if your idea of a great time is blowing your life savings in a matter of minutes, but for those of us searching for something less costly and more stimulating its welcome soon wears thin.

Utilising the strapline 'It's Going to be Legendary', LAST VEGAS baits its trap with similar blandishments. Who can resist the opportunity to watch an all-star cast of Hollywood heavyweights cutting loose in that sun-soaked high temple to hedonism with their own viagra-fuelled  take on 'The Hangover'?
The reality is considerably less legendary and infinitely more 'feet of clay.'
Without maligning in any way the professionalism of Messrs Robert  De Niro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, there's very little sense of any of them making more than the most token of efforts to create a plausible character for themselves. The overwhelming perception is of four big-name actors half-heartedly participating in a very generously all-expenses-paid lark which doesn't ask much more of them than to turn up, remember their lines and not walk into the furniture.
Playing lifelong buddies, now in their late 60s, re-uniting in Vegas to throw a bachelor-party for Douglas ahead of his wedding to a woman half his age, the cast goes through the motions with a minimum of commitment or enthusiasm. If it's not quite as lazy as Freeman's abysmal 2007 senior citizen romp 'The Bucket List' it comes pretty close. Where that film barely ventured outside the sound stage, preferring to stand its stars in front of a green screen, LAST VEGAS does at least have the decency to actually shoot in Las Vegas but the end result is not much different.
The story's unimaginative, the characters half-formed and predictable, and the humor mostly non-existent. While by the end of it all De Niro, Douglas, Freeman and Kline have unsurprisingly discovered a new lease on life, I was left feeling much like one of those suckers Las Vegas depends on who put their retirement fund on red and came up empty.