I was surprised how welcome it is to see Arnold
Schwarzenegger back on the big screen in a starring role. It’s at least as good
as it is to see South Korean horror/action/comedy hybrid genre filmmaker Kim Jee-woon's
new feature opening wide all across America, come to think of it. That the
former’s return and the latter’s Hollywood debut is one and the same is a nice
bonus. If only the movie they made together was better. It's the kind of pared
down actioner featuring a small setting and big stakes that should make for
some nice lean excitement. And sometimes it does. This is a movie of fleeting
diversions, but mostly it plays as witlessly flip, excessively violent, and
creakily predictable.
The slight plot features a fugitive drug cartel leader (Eduardo Noriega) fleeing capture, leaving a frustrated F.B.I. agent (Forest Whitaker)
in Las Vegas. He stays a step ahead of the feds, racing a super fast sports car
towards the Mexican border. To get there, he has to go through a sleepy
one-stoplight Arizona town where the aging sheriff (Schwarzenegger) and his
green deputies (Luis Guzmán, Jaimie Alexander, and Zach Gilford) are dealing
with a shady trucker (Peter Stormare) and a missing milk farmer (Harry Dean
Stanton). They’re a bunch of stock characters – complete with stereotypically
twangy Americana scoring in the background – waiting around for the shooting to
start. The film works along parallel paths as a car chase zooms towards a slow
small town mystery, cutting between the two, biding its time before the two halves
will eventually collide in a whole climax in which every character gets to play
a part.
If you don’t think a crazy weapons-museum proprietor (Johnny
Knoxville) and a jailed-for-the-weekend drunk and disorderly Iraq war veteran (Rodrigo
Santoro) will become important in the lengthy climactic firefight, then you’ve
not seen an action movie before. But who would go to this movie without having
seen an action movie before? The script cobbled together by Andrew Knauer, Jeffrey
Nachmanoff and George Nolfi leaves no room for memorable characters beyond the
typecast personas. It’s an uncomplicated movie of dusty setups for obvious payoffs
that take their sweet time showing up. In the opening scene, Schwarzenegger is
thrown the keys to a shiny new car, its owner telling him “Don't let anything
happen to it.” It’s overwhelmingly obvious what condition that car will be in
by the movie’s end. There’s a lot of bloodshed coming as well and when the sheriff
growls that he “knows what’s coming,” I believed him, because I did too.
Cartoonish and hollow, it is, in tone and genre positioning,
a pale American echo of Kim's slapstick spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, the Weird. That’s not a great film, but it’s a similarly
convoluted and empty expression of well-staged style. The Last Stand has an admirable looseness about it, a jokiness that
sometimes comes across as genuine. I especially liked when Schwarzenegger has a
line about one of the villains “making us immigrants look bad.” It’s not often
that one of his pictures feels the desire to explain, even in a throwaway line,
why a thick Austrian accent is rumbling out of the mouth of an American
character. But the ease with which Arnold can command the screen is thrown away
by the ways in which Kim’s pacing is off. Jokes misfire through bad timing. The
humor is strained, especially when Knoxville gets involved, and the setpieces,
though clever enough at times, like when a car disappears into the night by
turning off the headlights, or when two men chase blindly through a cornfield,
never really becomes more than repetitive. Action beats arrive too slowly, last
too long, or end too soon. Plot twists are fumbled. I felt myself straining to
have a good time while my affection slowly drained away.
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