“How could Zuckembourg let this happen?” Thelma (June Squibb) stammers at the police officer trying to make out a report. Though her loyal grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger), assures her that Mark Zuckerberg had nothing to do with this, someone needs to be held responsible. She’s been the victim of a scam, convinced to drain her bank account for a fake emergency, and now it’s payback time—literally.

Writer/Director John Margolin’s Thelma is an endlessly thrilling action film that moves at its own speed. Clearly a loving student of the genre, Margolin uses the standard beats of an action film but on a much more senior scale. The chase scenes feel familiar; they just occur on mobility scooters. Working in tandem with the film’s composer, Nick Chuba, the filmmaker uses thumping action-thriller cues and whirling camerawork to give even the opening of a handicapped door a sense of life-or-death excitement. In some ways, simple falls are honestly more perilous for the 94-year-old protagonist. By using perfectly placed musical themes that feel archetypal to the action film, Thelma puts in her hearing aids like its Mission Impossible tech. Clearing pop-ups feels like hacking the mainframe.

June Squibb sets the tone for the whole film, which appears delicate but still full of hardscrabble tenacity, just like her character. There’s no stopping Thelma when she has an errand. We can say the same of Squibb in every scene she’s in. Thelma begins the story as a victim, but by the end, Squibb has straightened her spine and takes aim at the resolution with full guns blazing. Though people are constantly telling her character that she’s fragile, Squibb is always the center of gravity, not pulling focus but creating an orbit for her colleagues to perform and find the space to play. 

Fred Hechinger is the closest to her as the ideal grandson, adrift in his own aging process as a twentysomething slacker with hazy ambitions. Hechinger’s Daniel is perfectly adorable, playing off June Squibb with a tender reverence that stretches beyond acting into a clear sense of affection for his costar. Still, Hechinger makes enough choices to show Daniel’s growth as an individual throughout the film. Like Thelma, he needs to find his path through life, but first, he must come out from under the crushing weight of his parents, Gail and Alan (Parker Posey and Clark Gregg).

You couldn’t ask to be suffocated by a better pair. Posey and Gregg are a natural and unholy couple who join forces to get under every last nerve possible, both for grandparent and grandson. Posey brings her Christopher Guest-trained talents for gift-wrapped condescension, mixed with Gregg’s cold objectivism to form a lethal set of helicopter parents who can coddle and nag Daniel to the edge. Well-intentioned or not, Gail and Alan’s help is thinly veiled control, which they try to exert over Daniel and Thelma as best they can “for their mental health.”

Control is hard to keep when your (grand)mother has Shaft on her side. The late Richard Roundtree makes his final film appearance as Ben, a longtime friend of Thelma who agrees to help her. Ben is at once getaway driver, tough guy, and lookout; but he also gives Roundtree plenty of opportunity to show his chops as a romantic lead and wise elder. Ben is a fitting swan song for the action legend because it displays Roundtree’s range as a phenomenal performer while playing in the modern form of the genre that he helped solidify.

Like any good action film, Thelma treads on social ills that threaten us. We have “no moral center as a society,” Gail sighs in her exacerbated air. It’s easy to agree with her. The inciting action is hard to watch. We don’t like to think that someone would prey on the elderly and scam them out of their life savings. But it happens.

The recent trend of phishing scams in action films, including Thelma and The Beekeeper, points to a total disillusion of public trust. We no longer trust each other and have no faith in our institutions to have our back. Though certain protections like the Electronic Fund Transfer Act would certainly have insured Mrs. Parker (Phylicia Rashad) in The Beekeeper, thus preventing her suicide and sparing us a bumbling B-movie, Thelma’s scam involves cash, which makes her particularly vulnerable. She’s way less likely to get her money back from the bank, which leads to this action-packed goose chase.

The film’s endearing human angle extends to everyone, not just the innocent victims. Rather than being a pure scam of top-down exploitation, both the scammed and scammers (the latter played with menacing grace by Malcolm McDowell) are caught in the same system of elder neglect and poverty. Margolin gives us a worthy antidote for combating phishing scams. In this tale of losing money, the moral is to find family. Having a community that is a reliable system of checks and balances can reassure each other if news is real or fake. 

Thelma’s textbook formula, run through the eyes of a 94-year-old woman, feels like a summation of American action movie history. Thelma is not so different from the Tom Cruise she marvels at on TV. She’s got her inventive tech and obstinate sense of independence. She even injures the same leg that Cruise famously shattered doing his own stunts for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, the film she watches with Daniel. Grizzled and weary by the end, but not without a zinging exit line, she’s up there with any Expendable. 

Action films put us in peril so we might be reminded that life, friends, and fambily are precious. Thelma puts that into the long view. To live as long and happily as Thelma has is a gift, one we don’t see much of in the genre. But Margolin’s tenderhearted story gives us an action star who witnesses and appreciates aging.” Seeing the passing tree trunks from her car window, she remarks, “See how gnarled they are, and yet they live…What spirit!” She may not have much time left, but plenty of life remains. Thelma proves that with the right spirit, action can happen at any age and any speed.

Thelma scoots into theaters June 21st.

Thelma Trailer: