Still got it? Redford stars, not quite like old times

By Richard Roeper

For nearly 50 years, Robert Redford has been on quest to prove he is more than a golden boy matinee idol.

Of course, Redford has succeeded in spectacular fashion, starring in such classics as The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and All the President's Men; winning the Oscar for directing Ordinary People (somehow besting Martin Scorsese and Raging Bull), and founding the Sundance Film Festival.

He is legend. The notion Redford became a star only because of his looks is as ludicrous as someone saying Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a great basketball player only because of his height.

Yet like so many great stars before him, Redford, now 76, steadfastly refuses to go gently into that good grandfatherhood. In The Company You Keep, he looks and moves like a really fit, handsome 76-year-old — a real distraction, given he's playing a former 1970s radical who now has an 11-year-old daughter and is living a quiet life under an assumed name.

OK, sure, guys in their 60s become fathers — but the timeline of The Company You Keep tells us Nick Sloan (Redford) is a former member of the Weather Underground wanted for his part in a bank robbery from some 30 years ago in which a security guard was killed. So was Sloan in his mid-40s at the time — or are we supposed to believe he's about 60 now?

This is but one of the distractions in The Company You Keep that kept me at a distance...(READ FULL REVIEW)