If there’s one lesson to take from The Last Stand — Arnold Schwarzenegger’s big comeback movie — it is that you don’t want to be a bad guy in small town Arizona where the grannies tote shotguns and the village idiot sits on a stockpile of hand cannons and World War 2 machine guns.
Few films approve as openly of guns as problem solvers as this throwback to the days of lock ‘n load montages and heroes with good masculine names like Dutch Schaefer and John Matrix. In other words, Ahnuld is picking up exactly where he left off when he quit trying to save the world in the movies in favour of trying to save California in real life.
The Last Stand pits the stone-faced Schwarzenegger against a vicious drug lord who is making a run for Mexico after a daring prison break. To get to the border, the cartel leader first needs to get past a town run by Sheriff Ray Owens (Schwarzenegger), setting the stage for an explosive confrontation.
It is the Hollywood debut for Kim Ji-woon, the Korean director best known for A Bittersweet Life, A Tale of Two Sisters and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. He’s usually an original stylist who puts fresh wrinkles into old genres, but here he doesn’t deviate much from formula.
The Last Stand isn’t an affectionate parody in the mode of The Expendables 2 — it’s a note-perfect, beat-for-beat copy of the sort of films that Walter Hill and John McTiernan made with Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Willis in the 1980s. It does what it does very well, providing two hours of high-octane entertainment spiked with amusing one-liners and R-rated action.
The film is, of course, about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though we have seen him in a few cameo appearances since he became the Governator — including supporting roles in the two Expendables movies — this is his first lead role in a long time. Schwarzenegger hasn’t miraculously turned into a great actor during his absence from the big screen, but he still gets the job of action hero done well enough.
Time has weathered the old block of granite into a more human and relatable figure, something that Ji-woon exploits to his advantage. Owens may have been a crack Los Angeles police officer back in the day, but he’s also an irascible old man pissed off at having his day off ruined by a criminal who should know better. (“Ahld,” is his reply when asked how he feels after taking a spill.)
Eduardo Noriega as supercar-loving cartel leader (“a psychopath in a Batmobile”) makes for a pitiless adversary for the good sheriff. I could have done without the always-annoying Johnny Knoxville as the sheriff’s annoying comic relief side kick, but he’s about as much of a concession as the film makes to post-1980s trends.
The cast is rounded out with some good character actors, including Forest Whitaker as a bungling FBI agent (Feds in 1980s action films are always reliably dumb), the always-superb Harry Dean Stanton as a crusty farmer, and Peter Stormare as a sinister henchman.
The Last Stand trailer (contains strong language and violence):
Ji-woon paces his film nicely, allowing the characters some time to breathe and building up a bit of tension before he sets off the fireworks. And when he lights the fuse on the action, he does so with aplomb. There are some spectacular car stunts, bone-crunching fistfights and bloody shootouts, all choreographed with panache. The action scenes defy physics without ignoring it completely.
The Last Stand is ludicrous, the film fumbles some of its plotting, and the holes in the story are as numerous as the bullet marks after one of its shootouts. But none of that really seems matter because it offers up that guilty mixture of gritty action scenes and goofy one-liners that defined the best action films of the 1980s. It has character and heart that seem so lacking in the genre today. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media
