The only thing more appropriate than Robert Redford supposedly ending his acting career with a film like “The Old Man and the Gun” is Redford walking back his pledge to quit acting in the wake of the film’s release.

Because “The Old Man and the Gun” is not just about the inevitability of aging, but also about how certain men deal with that reality — which is to say, they don’t, and instead they choose to lose themselves in an endless series of chases.

Redford already was in his 30s when he made “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in 1969 and “The Sting” in 1973, but it wasn’t just his boyish face that made him seem younger than his actual age.

Although he has far less of a reputation for vanity than does Warren Beatty, his age peer, Redford is no less concerned with wooing his audience, even if it’s closer to courtship than seduction.

In “The Old Man and the Gun,” Redford plays real-life bank robber Forrest Tucker as a gentleman, even in the midst of carrying out his heists, to the point that even his victims are largely won over by his charms.

Being liked is important to Forrest, who even takes time to offer encouragement to a crying young bank teller, assuring her she’s holding up great for her first day on the job.

It’s little surprise, then, that Forrest confesses his true criminal profession to a woman he meets when he stops on the highway to check on her broken-down truck, all while police are in hot pursuit.

Forrest attempts to win over the widow and horse-ranch owner, Jewel, played by Sissy Spacek, through a succession of dinner dates, during which he almost leads her to shoplift a bracelet from a jeweler.

Although charmed by Forrest, Jewel leads him by the hand and compels him to pay for the bracelet, foreshadowing the eventual unworkability of their romance.

Both Forrest and Jewel live in the long shadows of history. One of the walls of Jewel’s farmhouse still bears the century-old signature of its builder, while the front of Forrest’s home directly faces a cemetery.

The difference is that, while Jewel has reflected on opportunities she lost by marrying young, Forrest still lives like a little boy who thinks the summer will never end.

Forrest’s story finds a parallel in that of Casey Affleck as John Hunt, the police detective who pulls together clues from multiple bank robberies to conclude they were all pulled off by Forrest and his gang, consisting of a subdued Danny Glover and an amusingly rambling Tom Waits.

When we first see Hunt, he’s in a sour mood due to his 40th birthday. After the FBI takes over his pursuit of Forrest, his precocious daughter suggests that it’s for the best, because if Hunt caught Forrest, the thrill of the chase would be over.

This is confirmed when Hunt tells his wife that the FBI finally caught Forrest. When she says to him, “I’m sorry you didn’t catch him,” he replies, “I’m not.”

Forrest’s former lawyer tells Hunt that, for all of Forrest’s jailbreaks and heists, the old man’s one true love has always been the chase. While Forrest has a shot at a life of freedom with Jewel, we know he would never be satisfied with such stability once she catches him leering at a passing armored car the same way other men would ogle an another woman walking by.

Like John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” “The Old Man and the Gun” shows us a man who seeks to deny the passage of time by engaging in pursuits that can never be completed.

And even before Redford backtracked on his retirement vow, I expected him to return to acting eventually. Because, like Forrest, he’s too much in love with making everyone else fall in love with him.

Redford identified with the Sundance Kid so much he named a cavalcade of enterprises after him, from the Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Channel to the Sundance Catalog of mail-order tchotchkes.

As he heads toward his sunset in a film so similar to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” it would seem neither Redford nor his characters can quit certain habits.

Consider this a recommendation, not just to see Redford place a fitting capstone on his career, but to feel Spacek’s earthy warmth, and to hear Waits recount the most darkly comic family Christmas story set to screen since Phoebe Cates revealed what happened to her dad after he dressed up as Santa in the first “Gremlins” film.