The film has received mostly mixed reviews : , it holds a 37 % rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes based on 107 critics with a weighted average of 5.2 / 10 , while 46 % of the audience has judged it with an average score of 3.2 / 5 . Slant Magazine gave the film two and a half stars out of four : Watching Christopher Walken , Al Pacino , and Alan Arkin sitting in a diner , talking about the old days , produces a certain kind of frisson , a comforting familiarity that springs from their collective decades of on-screen myth-making . Conversely , though , there 's a profound sense of despair that stems from seeing the man who played Michael Corleone lying on a hospital bed with a pup-tent erection , leering at his doctor in a scene that feels ripped from a sub-Apatow VOD knockoff . Your mileage with '' Stand Up Guys '' will depend on how much despair you 're willing to endure in order to get to the worthwhile stuff &mdash; scenes in which the rookie filmmakers get out of the way and let the veteran actors play off of each other . Owen Gleiberman gave the film a grade of B - , and concluded the following : Directing his first dramatic feature , Fisher Stevens does his best to give these gravel-voiced legends room to strut their stuff . But that 's the problem : The movie is too much of a wide-eyed , ramshackle homage to '70s - acting-class indulgence . It needed much more shape and snap . Still , when Alan Arkin joins the party as a dying colleague , his antics — at least once he gets behind the wheel of a stolen car — give the film a fuel injection . '' Stand Up Guys '' reminds you that these three are still way too good to collapse into shticky self-parody , even when they 're in a movie that 's practically begging them to . Roger Ebert of the '' Chicago Sun-Times '' enjoyed the film , giving it three and a half stars out of four , saying : " Apart from any objective ranking of the actors , Walken is a spice in any screenplay , and in ' Stand Up Guys , ' there 's room for at least as much spice as goulash . Director Fisher Stevens begins with a permissive screenplay by Noah Haidle that exists in no particular city , for no particular reason other than to give the actors the pleasure of riffing through more or less standard set-pieces . " Mick LaSalle of the '' San Francisco Chronicle '' gave the film one of its most glowing reviews , saying it contains the " best performance s in years " by both Pacino and Walken ; As LaSalle puts it , the film is " difficult to talk about . Say it 's a movie about old gangsters , and you immediately imagine the other person thinking , ' It 's sentimental . ' Mention a scene in which the old gangsters show up at a brothel , and a whole other set of cliches come to mind . But '' Stand Up Guys '' is different . It introduces standard movie tropes only to subvert them and broaden them and bring out their truth . " At the 70th Golden Globe Awards , the film was nominated for a Best Original Song for " Not Running Anymore " by Jon Bon Jovi
70th Golden Globe Awards
70th Golden Globe Awards
Stand Up Guys