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Home Video | Review by Dan Taylor
Believe
me when I say that I'm a Bruce Willis fan.
How many critics writing for hip zines will
admit to that these days? Hell, I liked
'Moonlighting', saw DIE HARD 15 times, and
own the video and poster of HUDSON HAWK
-- one the most reviled flicks in all of
cinema history! But that doesn't mean I'm
above judging his latest work with a cynical
critical eye.
Take LAST MAN STANDING. Please.
I beg of you.
It has all the pieces in place
to be a heck of a flick. There's director
Walter Hill, who barely conceals his desire
to make the best Sam Peckinpah flick never
made by the master of ultraviolent cinema.
There's a cast that includes -- besides
Willis -- Christopher Walken as a gun-toting
psycho (now there's a stretch), David Patrick
Kelly as a crime boss and Bruce Dern as
a sleazy sheriff in the back pocket of the
town's rival gangs. Toss in a slide-guitar-heavy
score courtesy of Ry Cooder and we should
be in business.
So why is this update/remake/adaptation
of Akira Kurosawa's YOJIMBO and Sergio Leone's
A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS so deathly dull and
hard to watch? It's hard to say.
Willis is John Smith, the
next best thing to a man with no name. On
his way through Jericho -- a Texas town
50 miles from the Mexican border -- he becomes
embroiled in a dispute between two gangsters
looking to own the nearly-deserted jerkwater
town. His car gets fucked with, which lights
the fuse for his internal time bomb. Let's
face it...fuck with a man's car, you fuck
with his life. You might as well gang-bang
his sister and mom while you're at it. Smith
decides to stay while his car gets fixed
and plays the rival gangs against one another.
Sounds pretty good, right?
Plenty of potential for violent gunplay,
dusty streets make for spectacularly sepia-toned
scenery and then there's the bonus of Walken
NOT phoning in his performance. Unfortunately,
the molasses-like pacing and Willis's dime-store-novel
dialogue are laborious at best, laughable
at worst. I mean, can you really take a
movie seriously when a guy drones "no
matter how low you get there's always a
right and a wrong"? Yeeesh!
And Hill, whose career looked
to be on the right path with the magnificent
EXTREME PREJUDICE, seems light years away
from recapturing that spark. While Peckinpah's
flicks may have been long -- the director's
cut of THE WILD BUNCH runs 144 minutes --
at least they were layered with true characterization
and scenes that made you care what happened
to the characters. For all of the setup
in LAST MAN STANDING, the final showdown
comes is supremely anticlimatic.
Fun fact: The .45 pistols
and pump-action shotguns used throughout
LAST MAN STANDING weren't being produced
at the time the film is set.
