Frank’s and Alice’s thirty-year marriage is held together by a mixture of affection and bickering, marinated in a brew of hard-won wisdom. But the delicate balance of their relationship is strained when Frank discovers a bundle of love-letters from long-gone girlfriends.
One mishap leads to another, and Frank's daughter, Shirley, sweet-talks her mother into a visit, leaving Frank fuming in an empty house.
Soon Shirley and Alice are having a high old time as independent women on their own.
Frank isn’t having any of it, though, and plots to get Alice back. He persuades his son-in-law Clark, who is in the middle of a trial separation from Shirley and living on his own, that the two of them should take matters into their own hands and reclaim their respective wives like two red-blooded males. Clark agrees.
What Clark doesn't know is that while he, Clark, intends to accomplish this feat by flowers, Frank is planning to do it at the point of a gun.
Alice is duly abducted, and Shirley and Clark are left to give chase and, if possible, to prevent the police from turning this into a senior citizen Bonnie and Clyde situation.
Thrown together by the crisis, Shirley and Clark have no time to dwell on the differences that drove them apart. Instead, as Frank lands everybody in one absurd confrontation after another the young couple rediscover their underlying affection and need for each other.
From a near-shoot-out at a bank's ATM, to a visit to a Retirement Home where Frank runs into, and only narrowly escapes from, one of his old flames, the elderly couple lead their children and the police through a hair-raising series of brushes with the law until they are finally cornered back at their house.
How they outsmart the police in a virtuoso display of injured innocence, and how Frank also manages to bring Shirley and Clark back together, makes up the climax of the movie.