The Last Stand is a 2013 action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and directed by Kim Ji-woon. The film is Schwarzenegger’s first lead role since Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), as well as the first (and hopefully last) American production for the South Korean director Kim Ji-woon, cinematographer Kim Ji-yong and composer Mowg. The film is about a small town sheriff and his deputies who must stop a dangerous drug lord from escaping to Mexico in a modified sports car. That’s about all there is to say about The Last Stand.
No actually there is more. The Last Stand is the movie equivalent of the village idiot who, to avoid scorn, starts acting like an even bigger idiot so as to get in on the joke too and is painful to watch.
Here is the rest of the movie: the son of an overlord of a drug cartel (Eduardo Noriega) escapes FBI custody and begins a long, violent dash toward the Mexican border in a super-sized corvette that never runs out of gas even after driving at 200 mph from Las Vegas to the Mexican border. If only the auto industry could match this kind of gas mileage, oil prices would fall and global warming would probably stop in its tracks. Forest Whitaker plays the atypical FBI agent on the case and has an amazing role: it consists almost entirely of standing in a room, surrounded by phones and screens, and cursing every time he gets some bad news about a corvette he can’t stop with all of the government’s resources at his disposal.
This drug lord is unstoppable. He has scores of men, a mole in the FBI, lots of machine guns, plus this thing they call “the gun” — as in “Get the gun!” — which appears to be a stinger missile. If all else fails, he also has a super Corvette that no one can catch. But he makes one mistake, and you know what that mistake is already: He decides to pass through Arnold’s town. Ohhh didn’t see that coming.
The last 45 minutes of “The Last Stand” consists of nothing but people killing each other, a crazy bloodbath that is so excessive that it seems comical — except when it’s trying to be funny, and then it just seems a sick: People getting shot with machine guns, getting shot in the ear, getting stabbed in the leg, getting shot by an old lady, and getting shot in the shoulder. As for the shoulder wounds — “nay, ’tis but a scratch,” on some moron who wears a medieval helmet with a matching shield. Everyone is all up and making really bad jokes in no time.
Ok now that is really all that needs to be said about the film once again confirming JPFmovie’s theory that American films have become nothing more than a sequence of action scenes loosely tied together with some bad writing in between.
Looking at this muck after watching A Bittersweet Life churns the stomach. But you might say the last 45 minutes of A Bittersweet Life is nothing more than a murderous vengeful rampage too. To stand by such a statement is foolish. A Bittersweet Life’s scenes are gritty and unforgiving embodying a man bent on revenge at all costs. Not a bunch of scenes from the planet cornball. To think that these films were directed by the same person is nothing short of insane except it is true. Unfortunately for Hollywood, it is Asia one Hollywood zero-once again.
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