Paranoia (2013)

By the time most tech jumps from lab to retail, it’s old. All eyes are on the new shiny toy we don’t know we need. Woe the Hollywood thriller that wants to be techno hip, and takes a year to gestate before jumping into a theatrical pool already looking at NetFlix. “Paranoia” never stood a chance. We are tasked to root for a Brooklyn hotshot engineer (Liam Hemsworth, vibing like he’s never seen New York) who crosses the bridge to work for one CEO shark (Gary Oldman) and after a grievous faux pas is strong-armed into working for another Fortune 500 dick (Harrison Ford), with orders to steal wares both soft and hard. The drama tries to spook us with the notion that Big Business will always lurk … in a reality where we now the NSA is monitoring this review as it’s posted. Oldman and Ford square off grand, though no one is thrown off a plane. Damn it. Not even those guys can get past creaky dialogue and scenes where the duped-but-loyal girlfriend (Amber Heard) realizes her iPhone is missing and runs to dial her landline. Expiration date: Ancient. C-

Last Vegas (2013)

The pitch for “Last Vegas” must have sounded thusly, “It’s the ‘Hangover,’ but with old people!” But PG-13, of course. Impossible to hate, difficult to love, “Last” stars Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline, and Robert De Niro as life-long pals raised in a sunny, racially-harmonic 1950s Brooklyn straight out of Quebec that reunite decades later after the hot-shot playboy millionaire –- that’s Douglas -– finally decides to marry. The bride is 31 years old. Naturally, the pals fret. So Vegas, lots of booze and gambling, lots of fighting with automatic car doors and cell phones, and lots of wide-eyed stares at the shiny world. Then the quartet throw a raucous bachelor party that attracts the MTV crowd with one big ick moment: A college-aged girl tosses her naked body at Kline’s married horn dog, just hours after she tells him he looks exactly like her granddad. He demurs, but for oral sex, and comes out the hero. The incest remark goes unnoticed. The only reason to watch “Last” -- much like “Stand Up Guys” -– is to see great actors slightly tweak characters they played long ago in far better movies. It’s barely enough. B-