If the NRA were in the movie business, this is precisely the kind of film they would make. The FBI are fools; the bad guys are on the loose; they’re coming to your small community and the only Last Stand between your town and evil is a heavily armed makeshift militia. With the snappy dialogue and plot points taken straight from junior high school lunch breaks, The Last Stand manages to resurrect badass Arnold Schwarzenegger despite his pronounced inability to walk, talk or act. Bless you, Hollywood.
Arnold plays small town sheriff Ray Owens. It’s a small town in Arizona, so naturally I assume he spends most of his time racial profiling. And, of course, in an early scene, he deliberately introduces himself to two truckers in a diner just to get a feel for what kind of people they are. This is what you want, isn’t it Arizona? Every sheriff in every town checks out every noob personally? It’s spooky to think how much this puerile crap reflects an actual POV.
Somebody please remind me of how Forest Whitaker is an Oscar recipient. He plays Agent John 
Bannister, the guy in charge of incompetent FBI men. It’s painful watching him struggle to find a new level of incredulity with each burgeoning scene. This is a classic bad-guys-ahead-of-the-good-guys set up. The feds have to get drug lord Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) from Vegas to elsewhere, but the plan goes awry when cartel friends can anticipate each FBI move.
Quick quiz: guess the accent Peter Stormare is aiming for in this film: A) German B) Texan C) Hispanic D) Jamaican. I don’t know the actual answer to this question – it could be any of them. Stormare hasn’t had a great performance since Fargo, but has had many performances all the same, which goes to show exactly how much mileage you can get out of a good woodchipper.
Oh, what fun, granny is packing heat … and she ain’t afraid to use it. This is a moment pretty much directly from the NRA playbook — YOU and only YOU are responsible for your security. If you aren’t packin’ heat or are afraid to use it, then YOU deserve the consequences. Why shouldn’t an octogenarian have a shotgun? It’s a win-win. There’s a sickening awful to the way The Last Stand plot develops, because the details from the villain changing suits in an elevator to his cronies ramming an anticipated police roadblock are so intricate, the mind behind them must believe there is some truth to this world of imagination. Which means, in turn, that the solution to this perception of mythology as reality is also true — a small town with overly armed citizens out for some bad guy huntin’. No, them pesky wetbacks sure didn’t count on Johnny Knoxville owning illegal machine gunnery. It’s OK that a jackass owns an arsenal, because you just never know when those damn feds are gonna take away your guns. And here you go! Here is precisely the reason why we Americans still need an overarmed private militia.
There hasn’t been a crime movie written in such amateur fashion since Armored. Take, for instance, the scene in which a man is deputized from a jail cell without the slightest hint of humor or irony. Still, I gotta hand it to the producers — awful as Last Stand was, it was also a premise achiever. If the idea was to get Arnie back in the game, this film certainly did it. He looks tough; he looks capable. Yes, he looks old, be he looks Eastwood saddlebag stone-face old, not pathetic, girlyman old. Ummmm … good for you?
Hey folks! Der Gubernator is back
Acting to pick the slack
His steps are slow
His punches? So-so
But of cliches, he still doesn’t lack
Rated R, 107 Minutes
D: Jee-woon Kim
W: Andrew Knauer, Jeffrey Nachmanoff & George Nolfi
Genre: Idiocy, old school style
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: The desperate-for-Arnold worshippers
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Common sense fanatics
