The last man standing ... wins?
Action film combines the power of gunfire and a hint of comic relief
The Last Stand
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eduardo Noriega, Forest Whitaker Directed by: Kim Jee-worn
Running time: 107 minutes
Parental guidance: Violence, coarse language
Playing at: Banque Scotia, Cavendish, Cinéma Carnaval, Colossus, Côte des Neiges, Kirkland, Lacordaire, LaSalle, Marché Central, Sources, Sphèretech, Taschereau
cinemas
Arnold Schwarzenegger always said he’d be back, and sure enough, here is The Last Stand, the former governor’s return to the big screen.
He reappears in all his glory, a little grizzled, per- haps, and a bit thicker around the waist, but still straddling the line between exotic import (“You make us immigrants look bad,” he says to the Mexican bad guy) and apple pie Americana (he plays one Ray Owens, the sheriff of tiny Sommerton Junction, Ariz.)
And he still has a way with a giant firearm — in this case, a vintage Vickers machine gun — and a quip. “Welcome to Sommerton,” he says to several baddies’ corpses, the smoke curling up from the barrel of the Vickers.
The Last Stand is a brutal and occasionally comical action Western made by a Korean director, Kim Jee-worn, who seems tone deaf to the beats of the genre.
Kim, who made the ultraviolent revenge film I Saw The Devil, is too bloodyminded to sell the comedy and too relentlessly engaged in the power of gunfire to embrace the characters.
The movie is in love with firearms and their destructive abilities; we’re invited to cheer at a scene in which the good guys arm themselves from a huge arsenal of rifles, six-shooters, machine guns and a flare pistol.
Schwarzenegger’s sheriff is a former big city cop, happily out of Los Angeles and now running a department made up of comically inept deputies. Their mettle is about to be tested, however.
Vicious drug lord Gabriel Cortez has escaped from prison thanks to a giant magnet — one of the improbabilities that gives the film its unique flavour of pointless excess — and is headed toward the Mexican border.
There’s nothing between him and freedom except Sommerton and its aging lawman
Cortez is played by Eduardo Noriega, a Spanish star who looks more like a male model than a fearsome criminal. He drives a Corvette ZR1 with 1,000 horsepower that can go 200 miles an hour. Fortunately Cortez is also a trained race-car driver.
He has a hostage — gorgeous FBI agent Genesis Rodriguez — and he’s pursued by Forest Whitaker an FBI man given to underestimating the small town sheriff he will come to rely on.
How Cortez will get across the border is further complicated by various foils, including Peter Stormare as Burrell, Cortez’s enforcer, and Johnny Knoxville as Lewis, the town eccentric in a flap hat who runs a small gun museum out on his farm and is knee-deep in ammunition, quirks and humorous facial tics.
Kim can’t seem to wait to start the big gunfight, and then he hates to let it end, at least not until Schwarzenegger can do something iconic. Sadly, he doesn’t seem quite up to it. Near the end, when Cortez tells him, “Your time is over,” it seems as if he may be right.
He’s back, but now what?