24 January 2013
Directed By: Jee-woon Kim
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forest Whitaker, Titos Menchac, Peter Stormare and Johnny Knoxville
What It’s About: A semi-retired, small town sheriff goes to war with a Mexican drug kingpin and his small army.
Rated R (for strong bloody violence throughout, and language)
Runtime: 107 minutes
By Aaron Sanders, Diversions Editor
After a decade-long hiatus from film to serve as “ The Governator,” Arnold Schwarzenegger is back in his first leading role since Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
In The Last Stand, Schwarzenegger plays a semi-retired Los Angeles cop named Ray Owens who, after a raid that left his whole team dead, has moved to a quiet little town called Sommertown Junction where he presides over an inexperienced three-man police force. Fortunately for Owens, the high school football team has an out-of-town game to which most of the city population will go, so it should be a pretty calm weekend. Meanwhile in Las Vegas, an FBI agent (Forrest Whitaker) is set to escort highly-valued Mexican drug cartel leader Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) to high-security prison, an operation that never goes as planned. Sure enough, Cortez escapes and equips himself with a really, really fast Corvette Zero-One to make a run for the Mexico border. Soon, Sheriff Owens must go toe-to-toe with a Mexican drug lord and his army of mercenary goons with his small police force and an armory of old World War II weapons.
Korean director Jee-woon Kim, who also directed 2011’s masterful I Saw the Devil, makes his state-side debut with a run-of-the-mill American action film. While his direction is not inherently bad, he ditches the dynamic action style used in I Saw the Devil for a more commercialized look. Ultimately, the genre director compromised his distinct cinematic style to let Schwarzenegger shine as the centerpiece of the film.
I was never really brought up on Schwarzenegger; my family tended to lean more towards Jet Li. However, the films of his that I have seen—Terminator 2, Terminator 3 and True Lies—show an actor who can command the screen and pull an audience into his realm, and with The Last Stand, Schwarzenegger proves he still has it—for the most part. While his action-hero persona is still intact, his line delivery has faltered over the years. The timing of his bad one-liners is just off enough to make the otherwise excusable bad dialogue cringe-worthy.
After a stumbling first half, The Last Stand finally finds its footing and manages to be a fairly entertaining action flick. At a few points I even found myself rooting for Schwarzenegger to kill a particular bad guy or booing when the villain got the upper hand. The minute I came to terms with the fact that The Last Stand was just a mindless action film was the minute I began to truly enjoy it.
7/10
Courtesy of cdn.bleedingcool.net