The Last Stand: Could Have Been So Much Fun

Sometimes you gotta be careful what you wish for. Long have I bitched and complained about the state of action movies these days—how what used to be a blindly fun and silly genre has now become overly serious, overly gritty, and overly "realistic," which of course makes any action movie seem even less plausible. I miss the days of the 80's and 90's, where action stars looked like the Hulk, bazooka injuries were an occupational hazard, bad guys had ridiculous Russian accents, and the heroes always finished a major kill with a hilarious one-liner. In short—I miss the silly fun of action films. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a career with silly fun action flicks, and when I saw the trailers for Last Stand, I giggled with glee and said: "Yes! Finally, an old-school throwback to the action films of yore!"

And then, halfway through Last Stand, I remembered "Oh, shit, most of those movies really sucked. I forgot." Let's be honest—most Arnold flicks aren't very good. Even his best ones aren't masterpieces. Last Stand is exactly what you expect, and nothing more. I was hoping for something with a semblance of intelligence—not in the sense of complicated plotting or intricate character development, but something that was smart enough to know how dumb it is, like the great action films Speed and Face/Off, for instance. But Last Stand both takes itself too seriously, and not seriously enough. It has a good time, and occasionally I had a good time watching it; the final 30 minutes of blood-bath and mayhem were mighty funny and awesome. But the first hour was often just as funny, and I don't think any of that comedy was on purpose. It was, frankly, a little embarrassing. 

Last Stand stars "Ahnold" as an elderly sheriff, who winds up being the final stop on an escaped drug lord's road to freedom. It's as simple a story as you're gonna find in a movie, action or otherwise. And let's just say now that the action itself is great, on par with the best Arnold films like Predator, Terminator, and Eraser. So let's all admit that if literally all you want is to see shit get blown up real good, then Last Stand delivers. But does it actually deliver anything else, at all? Not really. Arnold himself seems to be having fun, but he also looked just flat-out exhausted—in one shot he has to run up a staircase, and even my lovely lady noticed that he seemed pretty winded by it. Peter Stormare plays one of the villains with delightful relish, but the main villain, the drug lord driving around in the bad-ass Porsche, doesn't know how to play evil with any kind of panache or style. He's a dead-boring bad guy, and unfortunately the actor (Eduardo Noreiga) gets more screen-time than Stormare. 

The screenplay is as bad as you'd expect. Actually, scratch that—it's worse. From the trailers I thought the movie would be more tongue-in-cheek, something akin to the perfect ridiculousness of Shoot 'Em Up. But it has consistently weird tonal shifts, where the scenes with Arnold are about as comedic as they should be, but every other subplot (which ranges from a romantic relationship between two other cops, and Forest Whittaker as the FBI agent hunting down the drug lord) tries too hard to be serious and dramatic, and therefore falls flat on its face. The dialogue is laughably bad, and you might say "Well, of course it is, it's an Arnold Schwarzenegger action picture!" And in a sense, you'd be right—this was never gonna be Hamlet. But I wanted the self-aware dialogue of, say, Eraser, where Arnold shoots an alligator in the head and says "You're luggage!" Here, we get juicy and memorable lines like "What the hell is that?" and "These events are all connected" and "He hung up on me again!" Big whoop.

The Last Stand was written by Andrew Knauer. It's his first (sold) screenplay. I'm sure he'll do better, just like how “Ahnuld” himself has done better, and probably will again. The essentials for making a good action flick are here, like having the last act be a combination of huge shoot-outs, fast car chases, and violent fist fights. But the details, the basics, are wrong, and often incredibly sloppy. When Schwarzenegger first gets the call from a young girl in the diner that the old man hasn't delivered the milk yet, he goes out to the farm and finds out he was killed by Stormare. But much later in the film, we see that the time is 5:04, which means that the girl must've been at the diner waiting for the milk at…what, 3 in the morning? Huh?

Or how about the whole premise of the climactic battle, where the cops take a last stand (ho ho) in the middle of town, and the villains show up to blow them away. But but but…the night before, they got the drop on the bad guys out of town, where they're building a very important bridge for the drug lord. Why wouldn't the cops just go back out there with their school bus of machine guns? And how did the baddies know to come into town and shoot up the awaiting police force? They must've read the screenplay.

Hell, even the final battle between Arnold and Eduardo is lacking all tension, because Knauer doesn't understand what makes an action movie exciting—a desperate desire for both hero and villian to accomplish their goals (which, of course, are total opposites). Eduardo wants to get into Mexico and escape the cops. Ok, but what's in it for Arnold? He makes a couple cheesy speeches about honor and dignity, but…there's no relationship between these two. They've never met before. Eduardo never actually did anything to the town or the cop. In the end of Face/Off, you could feel the tension, the pressure, the painful desire for those two men to really rip the crap out of each other. In Last Stand, it's two strangers that have already decided who's bad, and who's good, and because we have all seen more than one movie in our entire lives, we kinda know who's gonna win.

But that character tension is not only pivotal, it's essential. Look at Batman and Joker in The Dark Knight. Look at Keanu Reeves and Dennis Hopper in Speed. Hell, look at Arnold himself in Predator, where the titular alien kills all his army buddies, and it becomes, as they say, "personal." All of those movies ended with the protagonist and antagonist in a massively important struggle. We cared about one of them winning, and one of them losing. It mattered. Here, it felt like Arnold was just going through the motions.

I dunno. Last Stand is Ok, I guess. Certainly it's not a painful experience, but it's just not as much fun as it could've been. The dialogue, story, and characters are so thin and pointless that it often makes you wonder why anyone read the 90 pages of Knauer's script and said "This is worth 50 million and a year of our lives to make." The action is enjoyable, and the occasional glimmers of old-school “Ahnuld” (like "I'm the Sherriff, BANG!") make it somewhat worth your time. But this isn't worth a trip to the theatre, and frankly, it's not really as good as grabbing your old VHS of Terminator or Eraser and watching those again, instead.