Gather 'round children, those of you… say
under twenty. The guy in this movie, one Arnold
Schwarzenegger, who you might only know as the governor who
drove a state into the dirt and that guy who knocked up his
maid, used to be a real big movie star. Absolutely
huge. For a good fifteen years, Arnold took me from
adolescence in 1982 with 'Conan' well into my manhood in 1996
with 'Eraser'. Post 1996 Arnold… well… let's not speak
of that at this time and remember in the glory years that if
Arnold made a movie, me and mine were going to go see
it. No questions asked. In 2013, those days are
long over, and this makes me sad because as it turns out this
movie 'The Last Stand' finds Arnold in fine form.
Actually the whole movie, for the most part, is in fine form
but you children don't go see these anymore, and it looks like
you're not remotely interested in seeing this. You
either want to be intensely depressed with moody superheroes
or see sparkly vampires. To reference one of Arnold's
post 1996 disappointments, it is clearly the End of
Days. And Arnold shot Satan with a bazooka in that
one. Hell Yeah!
Actor Eduardo Noriega is Gabriel Cortez, the most brutal,
sadistic drug lord in all the land. I was thinking that
Mr. Noriega's real name is a way better drug dealer name than
the one they gave him, but that's neither here nor
there. Today Cortez is being ferried from point A to
point B by uptight FBI agent John Bannister (Forest Whitaker)
but we know he's not going to make it to point B. Nope,
he's set free in spectacular fashion and is on the run in his
modified ZR1 Corvette, with the world's hottest junior FBI
agent (Genesis Rodriguez) in tow as a hostage.
Now you would think that a man in a car in Las Vegas would
have all kinds of trouble making it all the way to Mexico to
freedom with the entire weight of the FBI and law enforcement
on his rear, but with the combination of Cortez really knowing
how to drive and the FBI really sucking hard, it's looking
good for Cortez.
But not so fast my friends. Say hello
the Sheriff Ray Owens (Schwarzenegger) and his crew of small
town deputies. Some bad dudes have made their way to
Sommerton in preparation for Cortez's arrival, led by the
completely rotten Mr. Burrell (Peter Stormare), and while the
Sheriff and his deputies tried to talk to these cats in a
reasonable way, tragically that didn't work out so well
and Sheriff Owens is pissed.
Here's how this shakes out. The bad guys have supreme
training, all kinds of gear like night vision and stuff,
superior numbers, and every weapon known to man including a
rocket a launcher. The good guys have a cute sheriff
(Jaimie Alexander), a fat sheriff (Luis Guzman), some unshaven
dude (Rodrigo Santoro) and the local town loon (Johnny
Knoxville) who by chance has an arsenal of his own. And
of course Sheriff Owens who just isn't any old small town
sheriff. No sir. He's that guy from 'Raw Deal',
only all old and stuff, and he's ready to kick ass.
Basically what we're saying is those guys with the night
vision and rocket launchers don't really stand much of a
chance.
Korean director Jae-woon Kim is an interesting choice to
direct a fairly brainless but entertaining American action
movie. His 'I Saw the Devil' was one of the darkest
thrillers I've ever seen, 'The Good, the Bad and the Weird'
was bizarre beyond belief and 'A Tale of Two Sisters' is what
those other two movies were, on top of being considered a
horror classic. 'The Last Stand' is absolutely none of
that.
'The Last Stand' isn't complicated, clever, or intelligent and
the presence of Johnny Knoxville adds an extra layer of
buffoonery to the proceeding, but what it lacks in cleverness
it makes up for in violence, what it lacks in complexity it
makes up for with speed, and do you really need a movie to be
all that intelligent when you have the glorious return of
Arnold Swarzenegger to the big screen? I don't think you
do.
And not to get it confused because it is, at least to me, the
presence of the governator which makes 'The Last Stand' worth
watching. He's older… much older, doesn't move as fast,
I didn't see one rippling bicep, probably because they don't
exist anymore, but Mr. Schwarzenegger still commands the
screen when he's on the screen and the old guy is completely
at ease in front of the camera. More than ever.
Probably because he spent the last six years bamboozling the
people of California, but Arnold Schwarzenegger in this movie
was a calming marvel. Besides, he had to be good
because the rest of the movie was pretty mundane.
Eduardo Noriega didn't make for much of a villain, and his
stunning resemblance to Lakers power forward Pau Gasol got a
little distracting for me after a while. The other
characters in this movie were kind of forgettable, Forest
Whitaker and his Academy Award didn't do much except whine,
and Peter Stromare's southern accent was an abomination.
All that being said, we were pleased with what we got from
'The Last Stand'. Old Schwarzenegger is better than no
Schwarzenegger, assuming this Schwarzenegger isn't in a
'Batman' movie, and the action sequences that Kim directed
were certainly above average. Too bad there just isn't a
viable market for this kind of stuff anymore.
