LAST MAN STANDING (1996, Walter Hill)

 

* * 

A drifter gets caught up in gang warfare in an isolated Prohibition-era 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 has joined meme culture, such as THEY LIVE.

A couple of years ago, I attended an all-night John 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

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.

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 world-building 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 choose 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

THE LAST EXPERIMENT (2012, Eric Wostenberg)

 

* * 

Two pals volunteer for pharmaceutical testing to make a quick buck, unprepared for the sinister consequences that await.

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 squat raves 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 for our benefit. 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; things don't liven 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 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

LAST ACTION HERO (1993, John McTiernan)

 

* * * * 

A teenager enters the fictional world of his favourite action star, who then makes the reverse journey into 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 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 fully recover from the fateful summer of 1993. 

My reaction on rewatching LAST ACTION HERO this time, 30 years removed from 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 reference TERMINATOR 2 or another Petersen movie, TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA? Or maybe 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 roll call 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

THE LAST KEEPERS (2013, Maggie Greenwald)

 

* * 

Life’s a bitch, when you’re a witch – especially one which only wants to go through the usual coming of age stuff, which will hopefully not mean being ostracised by peers or shunned by a family of witches, of which you are one.

Starring  Aidan Quinn, Virginia Madsen, Zosia Mamet, Sam Underwood, Olympia Dukakis

Written by  Peter Hutchings, Christina Mengert

Produced by  Brice Dal Farra, Claude Dal Farra, Carly Hugo, Lauren Munsch

Duration  85 minutes  

 

How and why do actors end up in the roles that we, the viewers, struggle to explain the reasoning behind?

Take Mark Wahlberg. In the early ’00s, he starred in a couple of seriously ropey remakes in close succession. Nearly a decade later, Colin Farrell followed suit. Marky Mark essayed PLANET OF THE APES (2001) and THE ITALIAN JOB (2003), while Dublin’s favourite son signed on for FRIGHT NIGHT (2011) and TOTAL RECALL (2012). Were the actors making a conscious choice? Was Colin copying Mark a few years after the fact?

Furthermore, not only did each do his remakes quickly to apparently get them out of his system, but neither actor could resist taking another stab again later, with THE GAMBLER (2014) and THE BEGUILED (2017) – the equivalent to coming home from a night out having sobered up a little and then deciding it would be a good idea to crack open a can of lager from the fridge.

Meanwhile, it may have escaped the casual viewer’s attention that between 1993 and 2003, double Oscar-winner Gene Hackman featured in three John Grisham adaptations. THE FIRM, THE CHAMBER and THE RUNAWAY JURY – and that third one was his penultimate theatrical credit before he retired! Was Hackman desperate to complete this dubious hat-trick, and only having done so did he feel that his work as an actor was complete?

So, now then, with THE LAST KEEPERS, we have the example of Aidan Quinn.

Back in 1998, Quinn co-starred in the film PRACTICAL MAGIC, in which Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman play modern-day Massachusetts witches. Quinn serves as the love interest for the former, in what was a supporting role at best in a pretty insubstantial piece of fluff.

Then, fast forward 15 years to him signing on the dotted line for THE LAST KEEPERS, another slight tale of ‘nice’ witches living in our day and age.

So, what happened? Did 1998 represent the happiest time of Quinn’s career, and so he wanted to emulate the film he did that year? With someone like Aidan Quinn, it’s hard to pinpoint a professional highpoint. He had the looks and presence that should have made him a leading man, but his bit-of-rough to Daryl Hannah’s good girl in debut RECKLESS failed to catapult him into the mainstream. The closest he ever came to headlining something notable was BLINK, but Madeline Stowe was still the bigger star.

Alternatively, was it the actual content of PRACTICAL MAGIC that Quinn wanted to revisit? Maybe he’d been badgering his agent to keep an eye out for similar scripts ever since, and when THE LAST KEEPERS came along he snatched it right up.

We can but speculate.

What is easier to definitively judge is the quality of THE LAST KEEPERS. And that quality is ... meh.

The story centres on Zosia Mamet, a teenaged social outcast with only one friend who makes herself a dress out of recycled plastic bags – and then actually wears it to high school.

She lives a reclusive and idyllic countryside life with her parents (an earring-sporting Quinn and the agelessly beautiful Virginia Madsen), along with Olympia Dukakis in salty grandma mode. They are a family of practicing witches who shun the outside society that doesn't accept them and their ‘traditions’.

But Zosia’s desire to spread her wings and see the outside world – i.e. go to college, date a gawky classmate or, during a rebellious phase, the local badboy – send her witchy development off in directions her family had not expected and which alarm and threaten them.

So yeah, this is one of those stories about an adolescent witch finding herself while her supernatural abilities begin to flourish. I guess being a witch is an empowerment fantasy for girls? Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Charmed, THE CRAFT ... presumably some aspect of HOCUS POCUS and/or its legacy sequel? This must be the female version of how much the boys want to hang out with creatures of the night (MONSTER SQUAD), hunt down treasure on a pirate ship (THE GOONIES) and shoot bad guys and blow shit up (LAST ACTION HERO).

THE LAST KEEPERS plods along, with plenty of talk of chosen ones and prophesies of gifts and powers and the associated responsibilities. The big theme is the needs of the individual versus those of wider society, a weighty thing to deal with at any age, but especially as a teenager, when it feels like the whole world is conspiring against you.

But the movie never really raises the pulse. It feels like a pilot for a TV show that wants to be the next Sabrina or Charmed. Young Zosia Mamet is a little stilted as the lead, but I'm not convinced it’s really her fault – she could have done with some of her famous father’s coarse dialogue to chew over. Her most affecting scenes end up being her heart-to-hearts with an underplaying Quinn as her sympathetic onscreen dad.

Hold on. I just figured it out. As I just alluded to, Zosia Mamet is the daughter of David Mamet, noted playwright and movie writer/director. So maybe old Aidan was hoping to get in with her and bag an intro with the old man, and thus steer his career away from having to ever appear in something like PRACTICAL MAGIC again – or, indeed, another THE LAST KEEPERS.

Two stars out of five.

 

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  I mean, we’re assuming that the title refers to the central witching family, but I never really got what it was they were supposed to be the keepers of. Are they the last witches left in the world? Or maybe just in Hudson Valley, New York?

What would a movie called THE FIRST KEEPERS be about?  I’d like to see a biopic of England goalkeeper Peter Shilton who, with 1,489, holds the global appearance record in men’s football.

Previously:  THE LAST POSSE

Next time:  LAST ACTION HERO

 

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST POSSE (1953, Alfred L Werker)

 

* * * 

A New Mexico town forms a posse to go after a rancher who robbed another rancher; none of the ranchers are jolly by the end.

Starring  Broderick Crawford, John Derek, Charles Bickford, Wanda Hendrix

Written by  Seymour Bennett, Connie Lee Bennett, Kenneth Gamet

Produced by  Harry Joe Brown

Duration  73 minutes   

When I was at school, I think it was in Year 9 English, we had to come up with questions for a survey and use them to poll our classmates. Probably we had to then write up the results into some kind of discursive essay, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that my survey was about films (natch) and it included finding out which genre of film was the most popular.

Seeing that this was the mid-’90s, I'm certain that I didn’t put ‘superhero’ as a choice – ah, sweet, merciful nostalgia. But among the actions and romances and comedies and horrors, western was in there. And came rock bottom.

Westerns were old. Westerns were slow. Westerns were boring. My student polling came post-DANCES WITH WOLVES and UNFORGIVEN, and although I’m certain I had seen and enjoyed those award-winning movies by then, my views that day still concurred with my peers’.

Westerns were used to clog up the afternoon TV schedules, always skipped straight past when channel surfing. No one played Cowboys and Indians in the playground when I was little. My generation was the one that was supposed to flock to WILD WILD WEST in 1999 – what were Barry Sonnenfeld, Jon Peters and Will Smith thinking?

Today, having broadened my cinematic pallet, I know better. I know that just like any genre, the western has its good and bad entries, its different stylistic eras, its straight and skewed interpretations. Nevertheless, I still approached THE LAST POSSE with trepidation; happily, my caution turned out to be unwarranted.

The film starts off with the titular posse returning to town. The sheriff is among the party and "looks half-dead". There's a prevailing sense of everything not having gone as planned.

"What happened out there?" the town’s judge asks.

Well, the early reports are that four people were killed, the desert "changed all of us" and they didn't even get ahold of the stolen money which was whole point of mounting up in the first place. Plus, the remaining members of the posse aren’t too keen for the sheriff to make a full recovery, lest he reveal more of went on during that dusty journey.

"What's all this about?" someone else asks.

Thus commences flashbacks to show why the posse was necessary and then what happened when it rode out. Some kind of cattle dispute led to a saloon punch-up and then more than a hundred grand (surely millions today!) got swiped and scarpered off with. It’s established that the now-comatose sheriff is a drunk, but his drinking is clearly spurred on by the kind of guilt that only comes from possessing a strong moral compass, something that puts him at odds with the rest of the men who set out on their horses. And it turns out that the lawman knows a lot more about his fellow posse-mates than they’re comfortable with.

Ultimately, THE LAST POSSE is a THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE-style tale of the corrupting power of money, and the lengths to which man’s greed will take him. The flashbacks and flashforwards are pretty sophisticated for 1953, although I guess CITIZEN KANE had been out for more than a decade at that point. Its multiple-perspective structure makes this another RASHOMON-inspired flick, with the Kurosawa classic having been released three years earlier.

It's pacey, with the hour-and-a-quarter runtime leaving little fat on the bones, and the structure is employed confidently to generate suspense, surprises and pathos. It actually feels more like a noir than a western, with its moody tone, double-crosses and duplicitous characters, not to mention the choice to film in black and white.

I don’t know if THE LAST POSSE would have changed the minds of my Year 9 English classmates, but I certainly wasn't bored. It's not even really a ‘typical’ western, but maybe that speaks to the whole fallacy of the idea of ‘genre’ in the first place.

Three stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Debatable. After all the kerfuffle this time, it might be a while before the town puts a new posse together. But they were so keen that it seems unlikely they’ll be able to resist next time there’s troubled occurring.

What would a movie called THE FIRST POSSE be about? The first one I came across was Mario Van Peebles' 1993 effort, titled simply POSSE. Well, I remember the video cover, anyway.

Previously:  RAMBO: LAST BLOOD

Next time:  THE LAST KEEPERS

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

RAMBO: LAST BLOOD (2019, Adrian Grünberg)

 

* * 

When his adopted niece is kidnapped by a Mexican cartel and forced into prostitution, ex-green beret John J Rambo creaks out of his easy chair and heads towards the border to rescue her and murder anyone who looks at him funny.

Starring  Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Adriana Barraza, Yvette Monreal

Written by  Sylvester Stallone, Matthew Cirulnick

Produced by  Avi Lerner, Kevin King Templeton, Yariv Lerner, Les Weldon

Duration  89 minutes

And so it was in the Year of Our Lord 2019 AD that we finally concluded the epic saga of John Rambo, the beloved character who millions, nay, billions had taken into their hearts throughout decades of adventures. Finally, stripping away the layers of this complex man to give humanity a profound insight into the psyche of a true icon of cinema.

Uh, wait a minute …

Is Rambo really so beloved? What do we actually know about him? OK, let's see ... he fought in Vietnam and came home with PTSD. He wandered into a small town and got run out by the mean sheriff into the woods, where he was forced into waging his own survivalist war. Later, he returned to Vietnam to rescue American POWs and "win this time"; not long after that, he teamed up with the Taliban (not evil, yet) to fight the Russians ( … no comment) in the Afghan desert. Then, after a two-decade gap, he took his sullen and increasingly rubbery face deep into the Burmese wilderness to rescue a group of Christian evangelists by blowing mercenaries’ limbs off with bursts from a 50-cal machine gun. Finally, he rested for another 10 years before popping up in a fifth movie – more about which in a minute.

But who exactly is John Rambo? Do we really know him the way we do, say, Rocky Balboa? No. No, we do not. He’s not a person, he’s a punchline; a byword for Reagan-era excess and American jingoism. Rambo has no personality and certainly no sense of humour. His one facial expression is a fixed stoic grimace, coming from not being able to process how his undying love for his country has only ever been met with betrayal. 

In RAMBO III, there’s a bit where an Afghan boy is curious about this stranger who has just been described as "not what our people are used to seeing" (don't worry mate, he sticks out back at home as well), and so grills him with getting-to-know-you questions; the most Rambo gives away is, "I'm from Arizona".

Even Stallone himself – who although not the character’s creator (that would be David Morrell for his novel First Blood) did at least adopt him, taking writing credits on each instalment and directing the fourth – eventually stopped taking Rambo seriously. Witness this exchange from 1989’s TANGO & CASH, released only a year after RAMBO III (Stallone plays Tango):

 

Local cop: "This guy thinks he's Rambo."

Tango: "Rambo … is a pussy."

Nevertheless, Sly kept returning to the old soldier after that, first with the bluntly named and staggeringly violent RAMBO and then latterly in LAST BLOOD, with which Stallone intended to give the character a proper send-off. Well, I assume that was what motivated him, rather than wanting to add an extra wing to his Beverly Hills mansion or anything like that.

So how did Stallone decide to deliver this Rambo requiem? Well, as I was watching it, something was really nagging at me. I kept being reminded of another film, but I could never quite put my finger on what that was. Perhaps a closer examination of LAST BLOOD’S plot will shed some light:

After his loved-one is TAKEN in Mexico by a sex-trafficking ring, Rambo decides that he has TAKEN enough shit, and, having TAKEN his daily meds, decides that everything will be better once he has TAKEN himself across the border and TAKEN her back.

Hmm. It’s unclear why Sly felt compelled to resurrect one of his most iconic characters just to make his own ‘old dude steps up to fight and is better at it than we might have expected’ movie.  There's a certain novelty when non-tough guys and character actors do this, like Sean Penn (THE GUNMAN) or Bob Odenkirk (NOBODY) or even Liam Nesson himself, once upon a time. But putting an established action star into what is by now a stale and tired sub-genre (the first TAKEN came out back in 2008) just seems pointless.

Which, sadly, is the most accurate way to describe RAMBO: LAST BLOOD: there really is no point to it. The previous movie already ended the saga of John J fittingly, with the big guy finally returning to the family ranch back in Arizona and its mailbox marked ‘R Rambo’. ( … Rocky Rambo?)

LAST BLOOD doesn’t feel like a RAMBO movie, either. The previous instalments may have been increasingly over-the-top, but they did strive for some level of realism, or at least plausibility. This one has a septuagenarian excavating a replica of the Cu Chi tunnels all by himself (possibly not the best way to move on from the Vietnam War?) and then fashioning booby traps that would make Kevin McAllister squirm. Added to this, entries one to four were, at heart, ‘issues’ movies – they were actually about something, regardless of how gung-ho their approach may have been. The only issue here is whether Rambo can still kill everyone without getting a hernia.

None of this would matter if the movie landed. But sadly, despite bringing all the gory and inventive kills we came for, the result is grim, ugly and unpleasant.

I definitely have a lot of respect for Sylvester Stallone. How many stars have developed three franchises for themselves on both sides of the camera, including a brand new one in THE EXPENDABLES at 64 years of age? You could argue it’s actually four with the ESCAPE PLAN series (its lead’s age when the first entry was released: 67), although I don’t count that one since it’s strictly an acting gig only.

But you have to know when it’s time to put a horse out to pasture. When it comes to John Rambo, ‘last’ really should mean that we won’t ever see him again.

Two stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  I certainly bloody hope so.

What would a movie called RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD be about?  No need to speculate.

Previously:  LAST MAN DOWN 

Next time:  THE LAST POSSE

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com