Forest Whitaker and Arnold Schwarzenegger (Merrick Morton/Lionsgate)“This is getting boring. Get the big gun.” Such are the all too apt orders from an evil henchman in The Last Stand, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s return to the big screen after a second career in politics. In a story that pits big-city law enforcement with a sleepy-town sheriff, you might expect small town life to be a lazy affair. Unfortunately, the big gun is kind of boring too.
The pieces that go into this genre puzzle include elements recognizable from classic westerns and scripture, Jaws and Touch of Evil. Under the right circumstances, these pieces could have taken a formulaic action movie somewhere new. But thanks to an uninspired script and a mostly lackluster cast, it’s the same road you’ve been down before, faster but somehow less exciting.
Drug lord Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) is being secretly transferred to a federal prison under the watch of FBI agent John Bannister (Forest Whitaker). But somebody was tipped off, and in the middle of the Las Vegas night Cortez gets free and heads for the Mexican border—and right through the small Arizona town where Ray Owens (Arnold Schwarzenegger, an Owens if I ever saw one) is sheriff.
An aging Ahhhnold is still a credible action hero. The movie takes some notice of his diminished power, but not too much. Unlike, say, Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher, when it comes time for Ahhhnold to kick ass, you believe he is entirely capable of the job.
The problem is the supporting cast. There are good actors among them, but characters are poorly developed and/or knocked off early. Poor Harry Dean Stanton — I could have watched a whole movie of this curmudgeonly milk farmer shooing off trespassers from his property. Forrest Whitaker, in the thankless role of an FBI man, has a face expressive enough to convey weariness in the life of a G-man, but his signature droopy eye could also be an uncontrollable facial manifestation of despair at the mess he got into.
But an action movie needs strong villains too. Jack Reacher flatlined but it made the brilliant casting coup of hiring Werner Herzog to play its Russian finger-chewing bad guy. Not so here. It’s a bad sign when you spend the movie recasting key roles. Evil henchman Peter Stormare is a decent character actor, but I couldn’t help thinking it would have been a juicy role for the strange brute force of Timothy Carey in his prime. Eduardo Noriega, as drug kingpin Gabriel Cortez, is supposed to be the epitome of evil, down to a Hitler reference. But instead of coming off as threatening or mysterious, he conveys the banality of evil, with a pretty hair-do.
The producers could have gone a few different directions with this: Simian-jawed Denis Lavant bears some resemblance to Noriega, and as anyone who saw his chameleon-like performance in Holy Motors last year can attest, he would have given this role a seething, properly snakelike flair. Or they could have gone a more comedic route with Tommy Wiseau, whose presence would improve many of the movies I see in any given year. Either actor would have maintained the script’s theme of good immigrant vs. bad immigrant, and added a villainous spark that is sorely missing here.
Genesis Rodriguez and Eduardo Noriega (Merrick Morton/Lionsgate)Future casting ideas for the former governor come to mind as well. One of his signature lines in the film, “I’m the sheriff!” recalls Rosie O’Donnell’s ill-conceived performance as a woman with Down syndrome in the TV movie Riding the Bus with my Sister. One of O’Donnell’s most celebrated lines in that cultural disaster is, coincidentally, “I’m the Sheriff!” and one can only imagine how Schwarzenegger could deliver such dialogue.
There are characters that are simply misguided. Rustic relief comes in the form of Lewis Dinkum (Johnny Knoxville), a role that tries to bring The A-Team’s crazy man Murdoch to the 21st century. It wasn’t that funny in the 1980s, and it isn’t funny now, despite or because of the historical firearm that plays a crucial role in the plot’s judgment day and politics.
Director Jee-woon Kim is known for Korean genre films like the grisly crime drama I Saw the Devil and the po-mo western The Good, the Bad, and the Weird. An outsider’s view of western action hero tropes would have been a welcome antidote to standard American product, but Kim’s Hollywood debut is perhaps too enamored of American sources to inject much life into them. By the time the titular last stand comes around, the battle between good and evil is more tautly drawn, but it’s not enough to redeem a villain whose worse trait is blandness.
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The Last Stand
Directed by Jee-woon Kim
Written by Andrew Knauer, Jeffrey Nachmanoff, and George Nolfi.
With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forest Whitaker, Eduardo Noriega, Johnny Knoxville, Jaime Alexander.
Rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, and language.
Opens today at a multiplex near you.
