— It's a shoe!
— Mm, yeah. All kinds of berries. Raspberries. Blueberries. Blackberries. Cherries. Uh, elderberries.
It killed me that they filmed all the L.A. night scenes like Michael Mann's Heat. But not as much as the overall story.
The film operates on a similar wavelength as Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz, with normcore, high-octane action scenes centered around Thelma going to the post office, or sneaking around an old lady’s bedroom, or falling and not being able to get up.
— Justin Clark (Slant Magazine)
The sort of Mission: Impossible DNA was always in there, in the idea of having the photo of him and having that and them watching it—that was all written into the script before we knew we could get the footage. And then we got lucky in that we got, I think, a clip of the table read and that scene to Tom while he was shooting, and he graciously said, “Go forth.” And so we got the thumbs up, and then Paramount gave us the rights, which we were super lucky to get it because I think it really helps signal kind of the thing that we are trying to ping there in terms of, yeah, the doing things oneself.
— Interview: Josh Margolin (Slant Magazine)
[It's] exhausting when we leave Squibb and Roundtree for Thelma’s concerned family. Accompanying Thelma’s daughter [and] son-in-law [in] their stressed-out search for the at-large Thelma are some of the film’s more cloying themes, specifically wrapped up in the agency of her slacker grandson Danny[. He] plays the part endearingly, but we don’t need more films about twentysomethings learning to take some initiative. We need more films about nonagenarians accidentally discharging firearms and attempting to email.
— Jacob Oller (Paste Magazine)
When 93-year-old Thelma Post gets duped by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, she sets out on a treacherous quest across the city to reclaim what was taken from her.