If you were wondering what a Chevy commercial would look like
with more Second Amendment in it, then by all means check out the zaniness of The Last Stand.
And if those two elements — burnouts and bullets — weren’t
enough, then let me just namedrop some guy they call Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s
back, and in this pancake of schlock that’s so bad I started to appreciate it
for its overt awfulness. You sorta cringe-smile your way through it, because, “Hey,
look, Arnold ’s
back in the movies.”
Yes, after a lengthy foray into politics, Arnold is back in the acting business, though
I use the phrase “acting” very loosely. The
Last Stand is his first full starring role since the third Terminator movie in 2003. The years have
been kind on the Governator: he’s a little more wrinkly and squinty, but he
still looks like a mountain of muscle. Though he really should mash down that
vertical boy-band haircut; it’s scaring the ladies at the senior center.
He plays Ray Owens, sheriff of the sleepy (and fictional) Arizona border town of Somerton Junction . After a cartel kingpin
slips through FBI custody, Sheriff Owens only has half a day to prepare his
three deputies for what is sure to be an all-out war as the fugitive attempts
to cross into Mexico
at a narrow ravine outside Somerton. The situation grows more dire after the
kingpin creates all sorts of trouble as he drives through the Arizona desert in a tricked-out Corvette, a
car that can do 95 mph in reverse and send SUVs toppling down the highway by simply
brushing past them. There’s an ongoing trick where the Corvette turns its
lights out and drives in the dark, and the police helicopter can’t find it
because of an obvious mistake in the script: the helicopter’s flying 10 feet
above the highway and it’s spotlight is apparently fixed in one position.
Chevrolet paid for the privilege to be in The Last Stand and it must have paid handsomely because every person
in town drives a Chevy, from the mayor right on down to the football boosters. The
term “product placement” implies that the products were semi-hidden within the
scenery of a movie. This is something more akin to product cluster-bombing. And
then, as if one racing Chevy weren’t enough, the last scene is a chase
featuring two competing Chevy muscle cars. Neither is faster than the other,
which is Chevy’s way of saying you should stop into your nearest dealership to
buy both.
For being a comic-action movie, with Arnold ’s deadpan delivery of jokes rubbing
elbows with his gun-slinging machoness, there sure is a lot of murder in The Last Stand. At the Phoenix screening of the movie, local law
enforcement, including Sheriff Joe Arpaio, was in attendance. What an
unfortunate movie to invite cops to. In one scene, a dozen cops are gunned down,
chunks of meat blasting from their wounds, as the villain races toward
Somerton. Two scenes later, Johnny Knoxville, playing the local gun nut, shows
up to a gunfight with nunchucks, a handgun longer than his arm and a matching
medieval helmet and shield. I can’t imagine real cops enjoying watching movie
cops die and then have the film turn into a slapstick comedy, with Knoxville shimmering up a
telephone pole in his pajamas. The whole thing just felt uncomfortable.
The acting and dialogue in The
Last Stand are agonizingly bad. Performances are terrible, which only
compounds the awfulness of the writing. Much of the dialogue is unnecessary
exposition from all parties, be it Forest Whitaker, who tells FBI agents who a
cartel kingpin is, or Arnold explaining all his small-town problems to people
who never asked for his laundry list of senior moments. Even poor Rodrigo
Santoro, as the town’s ex-Marine — his “Semper Fi” tattoo is written in the Papyrus
font, as if it were printed directly from a Word document — gets involved in all the mindless exposition. His first words in the movie, to an ex-girlfriend, are
word diarrhea: “I can’t believe you dumped me because I’m a criminal, even
though I’m a Marine and served in Iraq and came home and couldn’t
cope with the emptiness.” Who speaks like that, besides bad screenwriters?
This is the way the movie unfolds, with a wistful abandon for
logic. Arnold ’s
acting does not help matters. He’s actually become a worse actor in the last
decade. I give him a pass, though, if only because Arnold Schwarzenegger is an
institution and it’s terrific to see him back on the big screen as he blasts
the evil from his town. His acting may be flat and wooden, but few other actors
command such a presence on the screen.
The last third of The Last
Stand is basically gun porn, with the sheriff and his deputies arming up
against the kingpin’s henchmen, including a coolly wicked Peter Stormare, whose
only weapon is a revolver apparently recovered from the Civil War. Then there’s
a shotgun guy, two sniper guys, big machine gunners, and a guy with a bazooka.
On the good side are Knoxville with the Howitzer
assault pistol, a lady sniper, a granny with a concealed pistol, Arnold with a World War II
machine gun and Luis Guzmán
with a Tommy gun. All these characters are shown cleaning, loading, stroking,
firing and posing with their guns in a way that can only be described as a love
affair. I didn’t find it as tasteless and glorifying as last week’s Gangster Squad, but it is still way over
the top and also oblivious to the ongoing national debate about guns.
