Movie review: The Last Stand | canada.com

The Last Stand

2 stars out of 5

Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eduardo Noriega, Forest Whittaker

Directed by: Kim Jee-woon

Running time: 107 minutes

Parental guidance: Violence, coarse language

Arnold Schwarzenegger always said he?d be back, and sure enough, here is The Last Stand, the former governor?s return to the big screen.

He reappears in all his glory, a little grizzled, perhaps, and a bit thicker around the waist, but still straddling the line between exotic import (?You make us immigrants look bad,? he says to the Mexican bad guy) and apple pie Americana (he plays one Ray Owens, the sheriff of tiny Sommerton Junction, Ariz.)

And he still has a way with a giant firearm ? in this case, a vintage Vickers machine gun ? and a quip. ?Welcome to Sommerton,? he says to the corpses of several baddies, the smoke curling up from the barrel of the Vickers.

The Last Stand is an oddity: a brutal and occasionally comical action Western made by a Korean director, Kim Jee-woon, who seems tone deaf to the beats of the genre.

Kim, who made the ultraviolent revenge film I Saw The Devil, is too bloody-minded to sell the comedy and too relentlessly engaged in the power of gunfire to embrace the characters.

The movie is in love with firearms and their destructive abilities; we?re invited to laugh at a huge pistol with a backfire so powerful it can break your nose, and to cheer at a scene in which the good guys arm themselves from a huge arsenal of rifles, six-shooters, machine guns and a flare pistol.

Welcome to Sommerton indeed. Welcome to America.

The story is also all over the place. Schwarzenegger?s sheriff is a former big city cop, happily out of Los Angeles and now running a department made up of comically inept deputies. Their mettle is about to be tested, however.

Drug lord Gabriel Cortez, described as ?the most vicious cartel boss since Pablo Escobar,? has escaped from prison ? the plan, which involves a giant magnet, is one of the over-the-top improbabilities that gives the film its unique flavour of pointless excess ? and is headed toward the Mexican border.

There?s nothing between him and freedom except Sommerton and its aging lawman (Town resident: ?How do you feel sheriff?? Schwarzenegger: ?Old.?)

It?s a wacky flight to freedom. For one thing, Cortez is played by Eduardo Noriega, a Spanish star who looks more like a male model than a fearsome criminal: he has a dyed blonde forelock in his sweep of black hair, a stylish suit, and he drives a Corvette ZR1, a showpiece automobile with 1,000 horsepower that can go 200 miles an hour. Fortunately Cortez is also a trained racecar driver.

He has a hostage with him ? gorgeous FBI agent Genesis Rodriguez ? and he?s being pursued by Forest Whitaker as an FBI man given to underestimating the small town sheriff he will come to rely on. That relationship more pro forma than real: the screenplay by Andrew Knauer senses it needs a subplot of comeuppance, but it can?t get too interested when there are more guns to fire and bits of skull to be blown away. The movie never turns down a chance to shoot at somebody, and the scenes of mayhem are disturbingly graphic.

The straightforward mystery of how Cortez will get across the border is further complicated by various henchmen and foils, including Peter Stormare as Burrell, Cortez?s enforcer, and Johnny Knoxville as Lewis, the town eccentric in a flap hat who runs a small gun museum out on his farm and is knee-deep in ammunition, quirks and humorous facial tics.

This all runs on at length: Kim can?t seem to wait to start the big gunfight, and then he hates to let it end, at least not until Schwarzenegger can do something iconic. Sadly, he doesn?t seem quite up to it. Near the end, when Cortez tells him, ?Your time is over,? it seems as if he may be right. He?s back, but now what?

Source: http://o.canada.com/2013/01/17/movie-review-the-last-stand/

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