Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: The Last Stand


This movie came and went with bad reviews and without doing much business, which I think justifies the overlooked tag. As for me (and I'm sure this comes as no surprise to any of you), I loved it.

The plot has the charismatic leader of a Mexican drug cartel escaping from FBI custody and trying to escape over the border. He plans to cross into Mexico at a small town in Arizona with only a small sheriff's department headed up by, yep, Arnold Schwarzenegger his own self. With his motley crew of deputies and civilian allies, which includes Johnny Knoxville and Luis Guzman, Arnold gets ready to try to stop the bad guy and his small army of cartel killers. Will he succeed? Will all the bits of business set up earlier in the film pay off? What do you think? If you didn't sleep through the Eighties, you know the answer.

Yes, it's extremely predictable, to the point that I turned to Livia as we were watching it and said, "Did we write this movie and just forget about it?" But it's predictable in the same way that a really good chicken fried steak is. THE LAST STAND is cinematic comfort food, and I really enjoyed it. The supporting cast, which also includes Forest Whitaker as an FBI agent, is good, and Arnold gives a nice low-key performance as he slips into the "old but still able to kick butt" mode that John Wayne used to great effect in the last ten or fifteen years of his career. Clearly, I'm the target audience for this movie. YMMV.

3 comments:

pattinase (abbott) said...

He made one or two decent films, but on the whole his name puts me off. It's not political just he is such a wooden actor.

wayne d. dundee said...

I saw this at the theater (my grandson and I were apparently two of the only 20 or so who did) and we enjoyed the heck out of it. It was everything you'd want from Arnold's comeback movie! Deserved to do a lot better at the box office than it did.
When Arnold inducted Bruno Sammartino into the WWE Wrestling Hall of Fame back in April, he got a big pop from the audience when he came out on stage at Madison Square Garden. To which he cracked: "Where were all of you when my last movie came out?"

Peter Brandvold said...

I was going to go see this in the theatre. Thought it would be a great popcorn flick. But I think it was only here a week, so I missed it! i'll be picking it up at Redbox on my next adventure to town.