erik lundegaard

The Last Stand
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The Last Stand (2013)

WARNING: SPOILERS

If “The Last Stand” had been set for a December rather than January release, it would’ve been delayed by Newtown.

A dangerous Mexican drug cartel leader, Cortez (Eduardo Noriega), escapes from the FBI, takes a pretty agent hostage (Genesis Rodriguez), and heads for the border in a car that can zip close to 200 miles an hour. The feds are arrogant and keep fucking up, the pretty fed agent is actually a traitor, and the only thing in the way of this damned Mexican and his army of thugs is a small-town sheriff, Ray Owens (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and his misfit deputies, including a former U.S. Marine, now town drunk, Frank (Rodrigo Santoro), and a local boob with a gun fixation, Lewis Dinkum (Johnny Knoxville). He’s got a virtual armory on his property. They need it, of course, to take on the paramilitary bad guys. And while they’re all wounded except for the pretty deputy, Sarah (Jaimie Alexander), they kill the baddies thanks to these arms and their Second Amendment right to bear them. Even a Granny with a shotgun gets a kill.

Just another liberal message from liberal Hollywood.

The good, the bad, the conventional

Question: How many facelifts can a person have before they can’t see out of their eyes? I get the feeling Schwarzenegger is close. His face used to be impassive in his action movies but now it looks pained. Everything’s so pulled back. What’s left of this man? What becomes an aged action hero most? He can barely walk, he’s no longer Mr. Universe, he’s just … a name. A brand. And judging from opening-weekend box-office numbers, not much of one.

“The Last Stand” got some early good Rotten Tomatoes numbers, I suspect, because its director is Jee-woon Kim (“The Good, The Bad, The Weird”), making his Hollywood debut, and a lot of critics are auteur whores. They’ll back the movie of any director they like.

But the movie is past conventional. There’s economy here, certainly. It all takes, what, two days at most? Most of Somerset, Arizona, is gone for a football game, Sheriff Ray is supposed to have a day off, but trouble’s a brewing. Ray suspects it immediately at the local diner, Irv’s, with its pretty waitress, Christie (Christiana Leucas), when he gives a casual glance around and his eyes, as squinty as Clint’s now, land on two strangers. He asks them some friendly-but-pointed questions and they vamoose. But something’s up. He feels they’re “off.” Since one of them, Burrell, is played by Peter Stormare, who put poor Steve Buscemi in a wood-chipper in “Fargo,” and who’s never played a good guy in his life, it’s not a bad call.

There’s an OK dynamic between Ray and his deputies. He’s a former L.A. narcotics cop, decorated, who lost too many friends and wants the quiet life in Somerset. They live the quiet life in Somerset and want action. They get it. Of course they’re not ready for it, and the most innocent of them all, Jerry (Zach Gilford), dies in a furious gun battle. The bad guys are installing a portable bridge across the Rio Grande for Cortez to zip across. Now they’re just waiting for Cortez to show up in his 200-mph zipmobile.

Kim keeps cutting back-and-forth between the escape in Vegas and the sleepy town, and we get some OK bits. The convoy transporting Cortez is stuck at a stoplight (I guess?) when a giant magnet comes down from a nearby rooftop and picks up the police van. That’s not the OK bit. That’s pretty stupid, actually. Then while all the federal agents rush to the rooftop, like all the cops in Gotham rushing into the tunnels, Cortez and his men take a zipline to another building. Then Cortez changes out of his orange prison jumpsuit and into a designer suit, while his team floods the area with a bunch of guys wearing orange jumpsuits. That’s the bit I liked. Of course they overdo it. They employ a dozen. Why not just one? Why not just the 4 a.m. jogger wearing the colors of the Dutch futbol team? A dozen and you know it’s a set-up; just one and it just may be a jogger.

Arizona cornfields

Off Cortez goes, pursued by a helicopter, with a pretty agent aboard (Kristen Rakes), but he and his men keep blasting through whatever obstacles are between him and Somerset. I guess we know that going in. I guess we watch to see how he breaks through. We wait for the showdown between the sheriff and the druggie. We get it.

It’s in high cornfields, cat and mouse, each in a roadster. It’s pretty cool. Then you think: “Wait. Cornfields? In Arizona?” The final final showdown is on the bridge. Of course. It’s the last stand.

Any bon mots to add to the Arnold lexicon? Not really. Imagine his strong Austrian accent:

  • “I’m the sheriff.”
  • “You make us immigrants look bad.”
  • “My honor is not for sale.”
  • “Game on.”

The misfits, along with grandma, do a fine job against the beefy paramilitary dudes, and two of them, the ex-Marine and the pretty one, fall back in love, while Johnny Knoxville, whooping it up like Johnny Knoxville, gets the pretty waitress. The pretty traitor-agent winds up in custody. The pretty agent in the helicopter? Still available, fellas.

Meanwhile, the feds, being the feds, show up late. It’s small-town ingenuity and a veritable private-citizen armory that handle this crisis. When Agent John Bannister (Forrest Whitaker) finally does set foot in Somerset, as the smoke of the finished battle dissipates, Frank says sarcastically, “Here comes the cavalry.” Fuckin’ feds.

In all of this, Arnold is superfluous. He’s even a drag on the proceedings. His main attraction, his body, is withered at 65, while all his deficits (accent, acting, movement) are more pronounced. At one point, in the middle of a gunfight, he stumbles through the glass at Irv’s, where we get this conversation:

Irv: How you feeling, Sheriff?
Ray: Old.
Irv: No. You got a few years left in you yet.

God, no.

All the pretty girls of 'The Last Stand'
An FBI agent, a deputy sheriff, and a waitress, respectively.

—January 21, 2013

© 2013 Erik Lundegaard