'St. Vincent' gets old, Bill Murray lives forever

At this point in his career, Bill Murray has become such a master of translating his own bemusement into the amusement of his audience that you could probably put him in a 30-minute infomercial about crop futures and still get a few laughs.

"Ladies and gentlemen," you can hear him saying, with just the faintest trace of a smirk at the corners of his mouth, "I'm here to talk to you about corn."

Murray established himself in the 1970s and '80s as a comedian with a rare combination of sarcasm, smarminess and outright slapstick, mellowed by a disarmingly self-deprecating edge. He earned his fame on "Saturday Night Live" and in blockbuster comedies like "Ghostbusters," "Caddyshack" and "Groundhog Day." After fading a little in the '90s, an older Murray reestablished himself as an icon of minimalist cool — the comedic patron saint of indie films — with his roles in movies by Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola.

His latest film, "St. Vincent," sees him trying to split the difference: He's as likely to slip on an ice cube and bash his head or mug shamelessly while dancing to baby boomer rock as he is to do a deadpan staredown with a cat that rivals the one in "Broken Flowers." And this isn't a good thing.

The problem here is the script, which leaves Murray precious little to work with.

First-time director Theodore Melfi serves up a fairly schmaltzy tale of a grumpy old loner who slowly learns to open up again through his friendship with a young child. We've seen this before in films like "Bad Santa" and "Gran Torino," but "St. Vincent" is neither as outrageous as the former nor as dramatic as the latter. Instead, it falls into a rather bland middle ground of bad-behavior comedy and tepid sentimentality. Still, there's Murray, and a great supporting cast, who rally to make this entertaining in spurts.

Murray plays Vincent MacKenna, a crotchety retiree in New York's Brooklyn neighborhood, who spends most of his time in bars, strip clubs and at the track. What's more, his house is in disrepair, he's getting fall-down drunk every night, his Russian hooker girlfriend, Daka (Naomi Watts), is pregnant, and he owes a lot of money to a loan shark (Terrence Howard). Vincent is obnoxious to one and all, and that includes his new neighbors, single mom Maggie (Melissa McCarthy) and her young son Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher).

When Oliver gets locked out while his mom is off at work, Vincent watches over him — an arrangement that continues after Maggie hires him as a default baby sitter. Soon enough, Vincent is teaching Oliver how to punch back at bullies, bet on horses and get a bartender's attention. Maggie isn't pleased by any of this, but it turns out that Vincent has a good heart under his gruff exterior: He's taking care of his wife who's in a nursing home due to advanced Alzheimer's (hence Vincent's indebtedness), and stepping up to help Daka with her pregnancy, when it becomes too visible for her to continue lap-dancing.

The film builds to life lessons as predictable as the sun rising in the east: Vincent teaches Oliver how to be assertive and streetwise, while the child brings out the old curmudgeon's long-lost ability to care for others. Basically, it's the kind of sappy "moral of the story" ending that shows like "Family Guy" have spent the past decade mocking. McCarthy is completely underused as the straight man, while Watts' performance veers between humorously over-the-top and cliched. Chris O'Dowd slips in a few zingers as a Catholic school priest, but the bulk of the film hangs on Murray.

If you're going to put all your money on one horse, the odds are pretty good with Bill Murray.