Ignoring his disappointing cameo appearances in Sylvester Stallone’s lame Expendables movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn’t appeared in an action film since he made the third Terminator ten years ago. So, as a child who grew up on a diet of 80s genre fare, the chance to watch the undisputed warrior king of the action movie return to his element after a decade of absence is a pretty big deal. And the fact that Schwarzenegger’s big return is being brought to us by South Korean director Kim Jee-woon, the twisted talent behind features like The Good, the Bad, the Weird and I Saw the Devil, well that just makes things seem all the more promising. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of doubts people will be bringing into the theater with them when they see The Last Stand though. Is Schwarzenegger too old to pull off action stuff, even in a film that portrays him as being a Sheriff who’s at the end of his career? Will Kim still be able to make a movie as gleefully violent as the foreign language stuff he’s known for while working with mainstream actors in the Hollywood system?
The good news is that neither men fail at their tasks. The bad news is that they don’t manage to surprise by exceeding expectations either. Schwarzenegger has never been the strongest actor (or English speaker, for that matter), but he’s always been able to make up for his limitations with his one of a kind physicality and charisma. While age has most definitely robbed the man of every trace of his impressive physicality, he does manage to prove that he’s still charismatic enough to carry a film. Kim, while able to slip in a moment or two that will make you stand up and cheer, is clearly handcuffed by making a Hollywood movie, and isn’t able to come close to recreating the sick and twisted stuff he’s brought us in the past. He does manage to craft action scenes that are engaging and fun to watch despite the fact that they’re a little mundane, however, and given the physical limitations of the aging star that he was working with, one can barely imagine the feat of planning and execution that took. While Schwarzenegger is clearly no longer a physical adonis, never for a second in this movie does he come off as being incapable or frail, and that has to be largely due to the protective efforts of his director. Hopefully Stallone and company will watch this one and learn some things so we don’t get so many shots of wobbly-kneed old guys trying to run in the third Expendables film.
The story here is ridiculously outlandish, but it’s simple enough that it won’t take long to sum up. A dangerous drug cartel leader (Eduardo Noriega) has escaped from the FBI’s clutches. The guy in charge of transferring him from one facility to another (Forest Whitaker) underestimated his brashness and the depth of his resources, and now he’s in a super-fast sports car trying to make the drive from Las Vegas to the Mexican border before he can be stopped. Everything the FBI tries to throw at him seems to be anticipated and gets decimated, but what he hasn’t planned for is the fact that the small town he intends on crossing through at the border is protected by a stubborn and capable Sheriff (Schwarzenegger) who isn’t going to sit back and let a fugitive roll through his town unchallenged, no matter how dangerous the guy might be. With the help of his timid deputies (Luis Guzman, Jaimie Alexander), an ex-marine who he’s got in the drunk tank (Rodrigo Santoro), and the local gun-hoarding weirdo (Johnny Knoxville), Sheriff Ray Owens attempts to create a road block sturdy enough to stop a guy who has a small army at his disposal. The results of his efforts are completely ridiculous, but in a fun way.
The supporting performances here, like most everything else The Last Stand offers up, are something of a mixed bag. While you’ve got proven, magnetic character actors like Luis Guzman and Peter Stormare playing the protagonist and antagonist’s right hand men respectively, most everyone else fits the bill of being a pretty but generic young face whose inclusion seems to be more due to the fact that corporate interests didn’t want this to be viewed as being an old person’s movie more so it has anything to do with anyone’s acting talent. Knoxville does manage to stand out as the wacky comic relief, but that too is a mixed bad. He blurs the line between eccentric and mentally handicapped, and while his strange behavior is good for a laugh or two, it’s also good for a groan or two, and you’re always left scratching your head and wondering whether you should be offended by his antics. No, despite Guzman and Stormare’s awesomeness, The Last Stand is decidedly the Arnold Schwarzenegger show, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because Arnie is awesome.
The action sequences are generally exciting and capably put together—with bits where Knoxville makes a guy explode with a flare gun and Schwarzenegger tackles a guy off a roof and shoots him in the head during the fall being definite standouts—but you can’t help but feel that they could have been even more effective if they were supported by deeper character work and more focused storytelling and tone. The over the top deaths are great, but there are really only a couple of them to enjoy, and they generally get surrounded by scenes where the gunplay is presented with a much straighter face. The film could have been better served by either going all the way and really becoming an exploitive splatter-fest, or conversely making more of a point to tell a plausible story featuring an antagonist whose plans and actions were believable and protagonists whose safety we actually feared for. The Last Stand straddles the line between serious and ridiculous a little too much, and it suffers a bit from never really committing to a direction.
It stretches its focus among a few too many characters as well. Whitaker’s FBI agent gets a whole bunch of screen time, and really his character serves no purpose other than to play the bad guy’s fool and to warn Schwarzenegger that he has danger heading his way. What was the point of this character getting so many lines? What was the point of him being played by a name actor like Whitaker if we never end up learning anything about him and he never ends up going on any sort of journey? The time spent on Whitaker could have been better spent further developing Noriega’s villain, who’s flashy and vicious but has no backstory or interesting motives whatsoever. Or it could have been used to flesh out Schwarzenegger’s sidekicks, who are generally paper thin characters who are defined by either a single quirk or a single lesson they have to learn. If we were made to care more about the primary players, we would end up caring a lot more about how the final showdown plays out.
Since the plot is the simple one of a guy trying to cross a line and another guy trying to stop him, the build up to that finale could have been a lot simpler as well. This movie has action going all the way through it, with Schwarzenegger and company investigating a disappearance, him and his people going up against Stormare and his people, and Noriega going up against Whitaker and all of his men, and that’s before we even get to the third act. Cut some of that out and take a High Noon approach to the material, where the whole movie is about the buildup to one big action scene, and it could have been a lot more effective. Have the bulk of the film being about Schwarzenegger’s fortification of his town and his recruiting of helpers, intercut with tension-building sequences of Noriega’s march toward the border looking increasingly more dangerous and unstoppable, and the audience would have been salivating by the time they finally saw Schwarzenegger springing back into guns-a-blazing action.
Here we get shooting all the way through the film, and after a while the death and destruction starts to become a wall of white noise. And we’re also given a heavy-handed bonding sequence followed by a predictable tragedy that works as Schwarzenegger’s motivation for standing firm and refusing to turn a blind eye to Noriega’s approach. That stuff wasn’t necessary. With just a couple more scenes filling us in on his character’s background, that could have much more subtly established the fact that he’s a stubborn man who cares about honor, we would have been suitably invested in his struggles, and the movie wouldn’t have had to turn schlocky.
All of this nitpicking is getting a little too close to trying to rewrite The Last Stand into being a different movie though. The heart of my point is that this movie is a solid enough series of action sequences, but its action sequences are really all that it has going for it. With just a couple more tweaks it could have been really solid as a whole. In the grand scheme of things though, a fun series of action sequences is probably enough here. It’s important to remember that this is the first successful action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger that’s been released in a really long time. During his prime his movies were often ridiculous and stupid, but they were also more often than not some of the most entertaining things to hit theaters in their respective years. Late career Schwarzenegger was putting out early-2000s action snoozers that were real chores to get through. The Last Stand feels like a good first move for his post-politics comeback, and could be seen as a promise of even better things to come. Let’s just hope Arnie is smart enough to keep taking the grizzled old guy roles, and doesn’t fall into the trap of trying to pass himself off as the unstoppable action hero of old. That could end up getting embarrassing.
