Review #19 LAST MAN STANDING (1996, Walter Hill)

 

* *

A drifter gets caught in the middle of gang warfare in an isolated Prohibition-era Texan town.

Starring  Bruce Willis, Christopher Walken, William Sanderson, David Patrick Kelly, Bruce Dern, Michael Imperioli

Written by  Walter Hill

Produced by  Walter Hill, Arthur M Sarkissian

Duration  101 minutes

When I first watched LAST MAN STANDING, on video at some point in the late ’90s, I had no idea it was based on anything. I’d never heard of Akira Kurosawa, and while I knew that Clint Eastwood had starred in some films labelled ‘Spaghetti Westerns’, I hadn’t seen any of them either and didn’t know from what they had drawn their inspiration.

In the end, I ended up travelling the path of the films that lead directly to LAST MAN in reverse order. I started to get more into Westerns and went through Sergio Leone’s Eastwood-starring so-called ‘man with no name’ trilogy, noting that A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS’ plot seemed awfully familiar. Then I tracked down a copy of Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO and thus completed my journey at the start. Well, not quite – I haven’t read Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, which is believed, albeit not universally, to have inspired the 1961 Japanese film.

Let’s talk for a moment about Walter Hill. Why isn’t he better known? In my mind, he’s comparable to John Carpenter, in terms of style (economical yet thematically rich), sensibility (men being men and fighting the system) and love of Westerns. I guess Hill never had a hit that birthed a neverending franchise, like HALLOWEEN, or any flops that became cult classics, like THE THING or BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, or one that joined meme culture, such as THEY LIVE has.

A couple of years ago, I attended an all-night Carpenter marathon at London's famous Prince Charles Cinema, where they screened, in order: THEY LIVE, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THE THING, PRINCE OF DARKNESS and IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS. On the first train home Sunday morning, I mused in my sleep-deprived state about which other directors deserved the same treatment; Hill came to mind straight away. I would definitely hit the Red Bulls to watch a five-movie programme of, say, THE DRIVER, THE WARRIORS, SOUTHERN COMFORT, 48 HRS. and EXTREME PREJUDICE.

But wait, no LAST MAN STANDING in that line-up?

Well, here’s the thing: diminishing returns. YOJIMBO is great. FISTFUL OF DOLLARS is also good, but definitely the weakest of its trilogy and Leone’s least accomplished movie overall (not that I’ve seen THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES.) And LAST MAN …

It’s a curiously empty film. It should have a lot of atmosphere, with its 1920's cars and clothes and the dust creeping through a sinisterly rundown town. It should be exciting, with a perfectly cast Willis playing two sides against each other and running a gauntlet of double-crosses and attempts on his life. It should be thrilling, with its John-Woo-goes-West sensibility, arming Willis with two Colt 1911s that magically fire 20+ bullets per clip and have the stopping power to launch people 30 feet in the air through plate glass windows. But instead, it’s oddly lifeless and even dull.

Is the problem style over substance? Sure, but that imbalance doesn’t have to be an impediment. I wouldn't call Michael Davis’s SHOOT ’EM UP (2007) a classic, but something like that does at least know what it’s got to offer and doesn’t try to overreach its grasp. Ditto DESPERADO (1995), which came out a year before LAST MAN and strongly resembles it aesthetically. So maybe the issue here is that the movie takes itself too seriously – that it doesn’t lean into being an exercise in cool sets, frenetic action and hardboiled dialogue, but misguidedly attempts to express a weight that isn’t actually there.

There's definitely too much plot – much of it delivered courtesy of Willis’s mumbled voice over – and not enough story. It's easy to lose track of the betrayals and switched allegiances and sink into apathy, especially since the characters are only archetypes (stoic loner, tough but vulnerable dame, powerless sheriff, bickering gangsters) and the protagonist himself is a blank slate. All that's left is to bide your time between shootouts and wait for second-billed Christopher Walken to finally turn up. It's worth the wait, naturally, especially for those who enjoyed his cameo in TRUE ROMANCE and were itching for more of the same, except with his hair dyed ginger this time since he's an Irish gangster instead of a jet-black Sicilian.

In fact, the supporting cast is the biggest plus and goes a long way towards holding the viewer’s interest. William Sanderson delivers exposition in his distinctively quirky way while compiling himself an audition tape for Deadwood. David Patrick Kelly simmers with little-guy menace. There’s a pre-Sopranos Michael Imperioli and a pre-Mrs Apatow Leslie Mann, and Bruce Dern has fun as the town’s lawmaker who keeps himself well away from all the trouble.

In the final analysis, I was reminded somewhat of 1999’s similar and superior PAYBACK, which was itself based on existing material (Donald E Westlake’s novel The Hunter and 1967 neo-noir POINT BLANK). The difference with the Mel Gibson film is that writer/director Brian Helgeland throws in a lot of dark humour, something the po-faced LAST MAN STANDING could have done with like a shot of whiskey for a thirsty and beaten-down drifter.

Two stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Practically everyone except Willis is dead by the end, so it gets a pass. 

What would a movie called FIRST MAN STANDING be about?  I guess a retelling of the book of Genesis? Zac Efron is ... Adam!

Previously:  THE LAST WITCH HUNTER 

Next time:  LAST DAYS IN THE DESERT  

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

Review #18 THE LAST WITCH HUNTER (2015, Breck Eisner)

 

* *

He’s bald, he speaks in a gruff voice and he hunts witches – lots and lots of witches.

Starring  Vin Diesel, Elijah Wood, Rose Leslie, Julie Engelbrecht, Michael Caine  

Written by  Cory Goodman, Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless

Produced by  Mark Canton, Vin Diesel, Bernie Goldmann

Duration  106 minutes

All actors want franchises. Why wouldn’t they? Guaranteed work for multiple years, maybe decades. And you don’t have to only star in your franchise pictures; they may have some contractual hold over you, but you needn't see them as anything more than regular work to support other, more satisfying roles.

They can become a burden, if you’re associated too closely with the character you play. It’s what happened to Sean Connery with Bond, when he vowed to "never" return and then did, twice (hence the non-Eon film being named NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN). He wanted to branch out beyond 007 and did a lot of impressive work during the ’60s and ’70s, especially for Sidney Lumet, but arguably never broke free of the tux and the Martinis.

Vin Diesel currently has one of the biggest franchises going: THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, which started in 2001 as a POINT BREAK remake with Vin as Patrick Swayze, decidedly quaint origins when you consider what the series went on to become. But a year earlier, he’d actually already birthed another: effective little sci-fi horror PITCH BLACK. And then, in 2002, Vin starred in xXx, a franchise he appeared to abandon after handing the reigns over to Ice Cube for the first sequel, only to return later. Just like he did with the FAST saga, except that time he sat out both numbers two and three.

We can, therefore, conclude from all this that Vin Diesel has a complicated relationship with franchise filmmaking. First, he wants them, he really wants them: three is a lot for any actor. But at the same time, he also resents them – hence the hasty abandonments. And yet, their draw is so strong that he will always return to them down the line.

Alright, I know what you’re thinking. How could Vin know that TFATF and PITCH BLACK would become franchises? He couldn’t, I’ll grant you that. But come on: xXx is 100% Mr Diesel wanting to be Bond (an ‘extreme’ Bond, no less), and by the time it came out, Vin was an above-the-title star, capable of turning anything he wanted into a franchise. (OK, maybe not THE PACIFIER.)

Now, three franchises might be a lot, but four? What does that tell you? Because when THE LAST WITCH HUNTER came into our lives in 2015, Vin was definitely going for a hat-trick-plus-one ( ... I don’t think there’s a name for that).

But here’s a question. What happens when you make a franchise starter that doesn’t catch on? If a movie whose only purpose is to give birth to more movies fails in its entire reason for being?

THE LAST WITCH HUNTER is what happens. You end up with something that is exposition-heavy and introduces far too many characters; a film that dives deep into its convoluted lore and lumbers on towards an inconclusive conclusion. But that's OK! It’s all set up now for a breezy sequel, with all of the worldbuilding out the way. Except... oops, sorry, we’ve just seen the box office receipts. Green light turns to red.

With a surer hand behind the camera, it might have been so different; no one can guarantee success, but you can give yourself a better chance. Whether they admit it or not, all modern action stars want to be Arnie or Sly – Vin included. But he’s failed to learn one crucial lesson from the legends of the genre: those two had the moxie and the self-assurance to work with significant directors with strong personalities.

For Schwarzenegger, it was the likes of John Milius, James Cameron, Mark L Lester, John McTiernan, Walter Hill, Paul Verhoeven and Peter Hyams. Stallone’s roster included Norman Jewison, John Huston, John Flynn, Renny Harlin, Richard Donner, James Mangold... and, er, himself. Even Bruce Willis did the same thing: McTiernan (again), Harlin (again), Brian De Palma, Tony Scott, Quentin Tarantino, Hill (again), Luc Besson, Donner (again).

But our Vin only seems to work with journeymen – Rob Cohen, F Gary Gray, David Twohy, Justin Lin, James Wan, Louis Leterriot – men who he can presumably order around. And how many genuinely excellent movies has he made with that lot?

(Dwayne Johnson, Vin’s contemporary, is even worse, seemingly unable to sign on for a movie unless it’s directed by one of his mates: Jaume Collet-Serra, Rawdon Marshall Thurber or Brad Peyton.)

It could be surmised that old Vin is desperate to be the biggest personality on set. But this means he’s a long way from getting a TERMINATOR or a TOTAL RECALL or a CLIFFHANGER – or even an ASSASSINS or a LOCK UP or a RED HEAT. (Excepting that some of the FAST movies are a lot of fun.)

When you resort to someone like Breck Eisner, you get THE LAST WITCH HUNTER. Did Vin really think he could start franchise #4 with the man responsible for Matthew McConaughey flop SAHARA and the weak remake of Romero's THE CRAZIES?

Put it this way, by the end of this movie, I was almost hoping for Aidan Quinn to turn up and thus set himself up for a trilogy of witch-based movies.

After all, everyone loves a franchise, right?

Two stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  If it’s Vinny D, then you know that he’s going to be the first, the last, the everything.

What would a movie called THE FIRST WITCH HUNTER be about?  Probably whoever Daniel Day-Lewis played in that 1996 adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

Previously:  THE LAST EXPERIMENT

Next time:  LAST MAN STANDING

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

Review #17 THE LAST EXPERIMENT (2012, Eric Wostenberg)

 

* *

Two pals volunteer for pharmaceutical testing to make a quick buck, but what they get is more than that for which they had bargained.

Starring  Travis Van Winkle, John Bregar, Tricia Helfer, Mircea Monroe, Eric Roberts

Written by  David Nahmodan

Produced by  David S Ward, Brandon Nutt, Chris Chesser, Karen Glasser

Duration  100 minutes

One of the best books about becoming a filmmaker the spit-and-polish way is Robert Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew. Written primarily about the production of the Texan director’s 1991 feature debut EL MARIACHI, it’s a timeless account of perseverance, creativity and self-belief.

Part of the book concerns the ever-resourceful Rodriguez’s efforts to fund his ambitions. One of the things he tries is volunteering to be a medical test subject: locked away in a facility with other ‘inmates’ trying out new drugs in exchange for cash upon release.

He clearly got through unscathed and with the funds he needed, and so partly owes his Hollywood career to those months spent taking random tablets and describing the effects to people in white coats with clipboards, all while trying not to think too much about ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST.

I wonder, though. Have there been any long-term side effects? Will it be like the Flower Power generation’s acid flashbacks, or ’90s ravers wondering if all those pills bought from dodgy characters in nightclubs are responsible for rising levels of depression – or whatever’s waiting down the line for today's yoof after sucking down all those capsules of their ‘hippy crack’?

Only time – and maybe Rodriguez himself, in a follow-up book? – will tell, but the experience certainly stayed with the director long enough for him to turn it into a semi-autobiographical movie, 2019’s RED 11. Before that – but surely, surely inspired by the same thing – came THE LAST EXPERIMENT in 2012.

The film focuses on not one but two volunteers, a pair of college buddies played by Travis Van Winkle and John Bregar. Travis VW is the stud, who can barely walk onto campus without an ADR’d coed remarking, "Hey, handsome". His only concern going in is that nothing will end up going in him anally as part of the program, something he asks about three times (the lady doth protest too much?). Meanwhile, John B plays the sensible one, who actually knows who the pharmaceutical company behind it all is and questions the purpose of the testing.

But, hey – they agree that if they can make a cool $3,000 each during their winter break, then it’s worth taking the risk.

On their first day, a long-term and long-haired inmate bursts into the pair's shared room to give them a tour of the facility, with added exposition. His arms are a cheese grater of pock marks, his performance is turned up to ‘irritatingly manic’, his accent is supposed to be British or possibly Australian, it’s never clarified. And soon he’s introducing our boys to a rogue’s gallery of other guinea pigs, whose diversity of gender, age and race betray a casting director who either did a really good job, or no job at all.

The score and the camerawork suggest a tone that's going for ominous, but the interaction between the two pals seems lifted from a direct-to-streaming AMERICAN PIE spin-off. Their unwitty banter sometimes gets so guileless that it takes a leap into the bizarre. On their first night, they indulge in this bedtime exchange:

"Dude, that blonde chick in the canteen was totally checking me out."

"Dude, is sex all you think about?"

"Yeah dude, isn't it for you?"

"... Well, yeah. Yeah, it is."

[Both go to bed without another word.]

Before it can completely morph into DUDE, WHERE’S MY NEXT INJECTION?, we move into the next day and the subtitle "Dose One". The movie proceeds from there, with medicine being administered and montages of the inmates being forced to describe their bowel movements, not livening up until an elderly patient freaks out and runs down the hall screaming. We then get hallucinations of bugs on food, nightmares of skin peeling off, wounds that seem to self-heal, more bugs turning up. "Something is not right here. Something is fucked up," Travis observes sagely.

THE LAST EXPERIMENT was clearly filmed on a micro budget. This is not in itself an issue, but more than the extra dollars, it could have done with an injection (ha!) of ideas and a firmer focus. Shit starts to get weird, yes, but it never coalesces into sustained tension or a real sense of mystery. When the truth does come out, it's pretty underwhelming.

The movie mostly just kind of ticks along, which is probably quite an accurate depiction of how the days trudge by for the individuals involved during one of these scenarios. But to make it worth watching a bunch of other people going through it, we the audience need something more to hold our interest than a few thrown-in thriller elements and Eric Roberts popping by for the final 10 minutes.

Like, say, how does a nice cheque delivered to our house when the end credits roll round? Whether we decide to put it towards making a movie or not would, of course, be our own business.

Two stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  The film ends with the lab getting burnt down by a SWAT team, yet has an ambiguous ‘but is it really over?’ coda. So ... maybe?

What would a movie called THE FIRST EXPERIMENT be about?  According to UNESCO, "In all textbooks of the western world, the Italian physicist Galileo Galilee (1564–1642) is presented as the father of [the modern] scientific method." Could be he experimented with combining gelato flavours or something?

Previously:  LAST ACTION HERO

Next time:  THE LAST WITCH HUNTER

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

Review #16 LAST ACTION HERO (1993, John McTiernan)

 

* * * *

A teenager magically enters the fictional world of his favourite action star and they team up to thwart a villain who makes the reverse journey to wreak havoc in the real world.

Starring  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austin O’Brien, Charles Dance, F Murray Abraham, Tom Noonan, Anthony Quinn

Written by  Shane Black, David Arnott

Produced by  John McTiernan, Steve Roth

Duration  131 minutes

Forty-two months. That was the gap between the release of LAST ACTION HERO in June 1993 and SCREAM coming out in December 1996.

HERO made a disappointing $137 million from an $85 million budget, bringing home a decidedly non-blockbuster profit of just $52 million. SCREAM, meanwhile, earned $158 million – nearly 12 times its production costs.

And sandwiched between the two was WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE. It didn’t make a big profit, only just doubling its budget, but nevertheless this third film is crucial to understanding why a tonal-mashup that both parodies and delivers on the genre tropes it dissects could be a flop, whilst three years later the same kind of project is a monster hit.

Audiences in 1993 weren’t ready for LAST ACTION HERO. They needed a smaller film to act as an aperitif to get them used to the idea of a genre takedown, before they were ready to embrace the whole meta thing in a summer tentpole movie. Fast-forward to today, and fourth-wall breaking with snarky self-commentary has practically become a genre onto itself.

So I don’t see HERO’s disappointing box office as a reflection of the film’s quality; its failure to connect with viewers was just a matter of timing. And coming up against a little film called JURRASSIC PARK didn’t help, either. 

But there was also the Schwarzenegger factor.

Everyone has to fail eventually and it was just Arnie’s time. In the 11 years since CONAN THE BARBARIAN, he’d had a pretty much unbroken run of hits, peaking with TERMINATOR 2, 1991’s highest earner. He’d become too big to fail – which meant that many were waiting for him to do exactly that. Factor in a marketing campaign that was confident to the point of arrogance, with Columbia Pictures deciding that HERO was too big to stay on terra firma, and knives were being sharpened. When the reviews came they were scathing and audiences stayed away.

Personally, I’ve never been able to relate to the negativity surrounding LAST ACTION HERO. It might help that I was only 10 when it was released, so too young to see it on the big screen (I did, of course, see JURASSIC PARK) and only consuming it later on VHS, when the heat was off and Arnie had gone back to basics with TRUE LIES – although his career would never really recover from the fateful summer of 1993. 

My reaction on rewatching LAST ACTION HERO this time, 30 years after all the fuss, is that it’s a pretty entertaining way to spend two hours. All it really wants to be is a fun and funny coming-of-age wish-fulfilment fantasy for 13-year-old boys. And it succeeds! Maybe the mistake was casting in Schwarzenegger someone known for R-rated mayhem, unwittingly acknowledging a truth middle-America would rather ignore: that kids lap that stuff up several years before they’re legally supposed to. If made today, the boy would have to be into something boringly age-appropriate, like Harry Potter or the Marvel content empire.

I don’t feel the need to defend HERO any further, so I’ll instead leave you with some stray observations:

– Arnie's first line of a movie primarily set in California is the prophetic, "When the governor gets here, call me."

– During the opening, Tom Noonan's dastardly Ripper calls Schwarzenegger ‘sport’, which I like to think is a reference to William Petersen's poster-worthy line, "It's just you and me now, sport", from his pursuit of Noonan’s Francis Dolarhyde in MANHUNTER.

– Is Arnie driving on the LA viaducts supposed to be a reference to TERMINATOR 2 or another Petersen movie, TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA? Or maybe to GREASE?

– I think that Stallone would actually have been great in TERMINATOR 2; his hangdog expression and stoic sensitivity are the perfect fit for a cyborg learning to appreciate humanity. Not so sure Arnie could have pulled off underdog Rocky Balboa, though. Come to think of it, surely naming HERO’S fictional film franchise JACK SLATER-plus-Roman-numeral is a reference to Stallone’s boxing series?

– When Jack and Danny enter our world, they’re in New York City, and they visit the Empire State Building – as you do. But in the actual landmark in real life, the material for tourists neglects to mention LAST ACTION HERO in its list of movies that filmed there. Which you most definitely do not do!

– It’s known for its star cameos (Jim Belushi, Tina Turner, Chevy Chase, Van Damme, Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell, Robert Patrick as the T-1000, Danny DeVito as a cartoon cat), but HERO is also a rollcall of noted stunt-performer-actors. How many movies feature Al Leong (DIE HARD, LETHAL WEAPON, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA), Henri Kingi (SCARFACE, ROAD HOUSE, PREDATOR 2) and Sven-Ole Thorsen (THE RUNNING MAN, HARD TARGET, ON DEADLY GROUND)?

– Director John McTiernan manages to cram in tributes to two of his other action classics within the space of a minute: PREDATOR when an elaborate laser sight from a helicopter targets Arnie, and then DIE HARD when the action hero falls down a building in slo-mo. Bravo McT, bravo! 

Four stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  I mean, debatably yes. Has anyone been able to properly take on Arnie’s mantle? Vin Diesel? Dwayne Johnson? Jason Statham? ... Daniel Stisen? You can argue among yourselves.

What would a movie called FIRST ACTION HERO be about?  They already did this with the Hamlet take-off. Other than that, I dunno … Errol Flynn?

Additional:  Was Arnie-as-Hamlet chosen simply due to its status as the Shakespeare play and therefore the play overall – or was it because Hamlet itself has a bit of the old fourth-wall-breaking meta stuff going on, what with its ironically used play-within-a-play business?

Previously:  THE LAST KEEPERS

Next time:  THE LAST EXPERIMENT  

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com