The Last Stand

The Last Stand (2012)
Dir. Kim Ji-woon
Written by Andrew Knauer
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Luis Guzman, Johnny Knoxville, Forest Whitaker, Rodrigo Santoro, Eduardo Noriega, Peter Stormare, with Harry Dean Stanton and an old lady with a shotgun (yes, that old lady), and supposedly Sonny Landham is in there somewhere, too?

So, I guess the thing is now, that people don’t like fun. I get it; really, it’s been a long time coming. Years of shiny mopey vampires earning top dollar, fun concepts like THE MATRIX and PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN getting bogged down in convoluted overbuilt antinarratives, people accepting Matt fucking Damon as a action hero, James fucking Bond turning into a menopausal weepy melodrama, a remake of TOTAL RECALL starring Colin Farrell. I get it, it’s our fault. It’s not like we didn’t have the means: sure, we may not have had the adorable ‘roided-up übermensches of the past, but we got Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel and even Wesley Snipes. And what did we do with them? Wasted em on disposable, phoned-in-wannabe-hip postmodernist crapola. We locked up Snipes, let Statham star in a Uwe Boll movie, forgot Vin Diesel existed entirely, and were so starved for action heroes we never even noticed that Johnson didn’t even fucking get around to making a non-remake proper action movie until goddam 2010*! And even then, the poor guy has to make a bunch of grim, brooding revenge thrillers like FASTER and SNITCH that are fine but totally squander his naturally hilarious novelty oversized charm.

So I’m not saying I didn’t see it coming. But you know, I guess I didn’t realize how bad it was. I mean, there was the EXPENDABLES movies, they made a pile of money and even though they were pretty lazy gimmicky jokey cash grabs they sort of had a sense of fun to them on and off. And Stallone’s RAMBO and ROCKY movies did pretty well and managed not to totally shit on the legacy of their respective franchises. They even had those FAST AND FURIOUS movies which started off so laughably inept and gradually got kind of good. I don’t know, I guess they must have made some money since they’re now worming their way towards a seventh sequel. And let’s not forget the KILL BILLs, and fuck, they even let RZA make a Kung-Fu movie. So I sort of had reason to hope.

Guess not, though, because audiences avoided this one in droves. Apparently they don’t actually like fun; what they like is recognizable franchises they can recognize references to other recognizable franchises in, and if possible could it star some sad-eyed pretty boy hipster with a perpetually manicured five o’clock shadow he could wear in a misguided homage to actual manliness, that would be great, thanks. Lesson learned. But fortunately for this world, not that you ungrateful bastards deserve it, but it turns out there is one guy left around who likes actual fun, and as it happens he is also one of the best directors working in the world today. Ladies and gentlemen, androgynous layabouts of generation Y, I give you: Kim Ji-woon. Having directed A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, A BITTERSWEET LIFE, THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE WEIRD, and I SAW THE DEVIL, Kim had already left a trail of genre masterpieces littered across the South Korean landscape and established himself as one of the world’s most fluent cinematic voices long before THE LAST STAND came calling; in fact, he’s so ludicrously overqualified for this kind of thing that it seems almost insulting to ask him, sort of akin to asking the Secretary General of the United Nations for help with your Spanish homework.

But, Kim knows the unspoken rule that all great Asian directors must endure the trial of an embarrassing Hollywood action debut before they can return home to make great movies again. For whatever reason, probably something to do with prophecies of a chosen one, Mr. Kim chose to make his American debut the same time that one Mr. Schwarzenegger decided to take a cue from Michael Jordan and come back off the benches for one last blaze of glory. They decided (I can only assume) to find the most ridiculous, cliche-laden action script possible and prove to the world that the age of the violent, musclebrained dinosaur could, nay, must return.

Well, it looks like that’s not gonna happen (poor Stallone and Walter Hill got it even harder when they tried to follow Arnold and Kim with BULLET TO THE HEAD, which was gone from theaters so fast I didn’t even have time to look up the showtimes). But it was a fun dream while it lasted, because THE LAST STAND turns out to be exactly what the title promises: an empty-headed but big-hearted celebration of shooting, car chasing, crashing, exploding, being Peter Stormare, muscles, shooting, wrestling, shooting, blowing up, and cowboying the fuck up. The last stand of the unironic action movie.

For some reason, this image didn't test as well as it might have a few months earlier.

Arnold stars as sheriff John Stand,** a small-town sheriff who is happily living out his golden years on the American side of the Mexican border, glad his violent days as a LA narco cop are well and truly behind him. Sommerton Junction, NM doesn’t see much crime, and in fact it seems like the majority of Sheriff Stand’s policing efforts are spent keeping his comically inept deputies in line. But that’s all about to change when a slick drug kingpin escapes the custody of hard-ass FBI agent Forest Whitaker and makes a run for the border in a racecar so fast it can outrun a helicopter. And he’s headed straight for sheriff Stand’s town. There are lines you just don’t cross. His border is one of them.

Right away, you got to be impressed by the simplicity of that premise. No gimmicks, no convoluted plot where everyone is trying to betray everyone and nothing is what it seems. Actually, everything is pretty much exactly what it seems. There’s this one asshole who’s heading to town to cause trouble, and only one man (and a few other people) who dares last stand in his way. That’s it. As clean and elegant as premises come, and hence a perfect instrument for an action movie, where the whole point is to make memorable detail out of the testosterone-fueled conflict. Honestly, this is the kind of thing that makes or breaks an action movie. It’s not the notes you play, it’s how you play them.

Train in Vain

Fortunately, Arnold is an old hand at this song, so he plays them pretty fucking perfectly. I was worried after his embarrassing anti-performance in EXPENDABLES 2 (which seems to consist entirely of a random patchwork of lines from his other movies) was so awful that I honestly might have preferred his computer-generated doppleganger from TERMINATOR: SALVATION. But my fears turned out to be ill-founded; given a real --if minimal-- character to play, the guy proves once again that he’s a human tentpole, easily able to support whatever action fabric anyone wants to drape around him through sheer teutonic charisma.

Obviously, Arny doesn’t exactly have the biggest range in the world, but he’s oddly believable as a regular guy who just happens to look like a cartoonish superman. Age has given his face some character, shaping his austere geometry into something weatherbeaten and full of history. There’s an interesting scene where a young deputy approaches him about his dream to leave this smalltown nowhere and find some action as a big city cop. Arnold sits back thoughtfully, agrees to help him pursue his dream, but also offers a word of caution about mistaking action for worth and meaning. It’s not a scene I think young Arnold could have pulled off, but this version finds something quietly sad in the perpetual allure of violence and youth and it comes through in his kindly but worth-weary delivery.

I swear, the guy's starting to look like Charlton Heston.

Obviously it’s not all so serious, but I appreciate Kim’s commitment to providing enough foundation that the action has substance. It’s all about icing, but he wants to make sure we have cake, too. And if you’re gonna make cake, you might as well make good cake, so Kim doesn’t let any of the background material feel obligatory or phoned in. It’s a good thing, too, because despite a number of well-choreographed action sequences peppered throughout, a lot of the film is about waiting for the enemy to arrive. Preparations on both sides, as we see the conflict draw inexorably closer. In fact, the film it mostly closely emulates (believe it or not) is HIGH NOON, with Arny taking the place of Gary Cooper as a sheriff who has to try and fortify before the storm arrives. Of course, he’s Arny, so unlike with Gary Cooper lots of people are gonna volunteer to help. Sorry Gary, but there’s a reason you’re not running America’s richest state. Just sayin’.

Those volunteers include Luis Guzman, Johnny Knoxville, Jaimie Alexander, Rodrigo Santoro, Zach Gilford, Forest Whitaker, and Harry Dean Stanton (presumably playing the same character he played in THE AVENGERS; you know, that guy who wanders into a scene and says something so that the audience can go, “hey, that’s Harry Dean Stanton!”). Those opposing him include Eduardo Noriega (ABRE LOS OJOS), Peter Stormare, and a bunch of heavily armed paramilitary dudes. Peter Stormare speaks entirely in what must be --in his mind, anyway-- a redneck accent. This is gonna be good.

I mean, hell, you had me at Luis Guzman. How often do you get to see such a crazy ensemble of fun character actors all shooting guns every which way? Not often enough, is the correct answer. Their performances range from outlandishly broad (Johnny Knoxville) to the more staid (Santoro as a troubled war vet) -- if not exactly realistic-- but seem to somehow comfortably occupy the same world together. A lot of critics complained that Kim’s limited English produced performances which are all over the map, but actually I think this is both completely intentional and fairly common for this kind of movie. After all, similar tones are visible in both Kim’s other works and (to an even more extreme degree) in a lot of Asian action cinema. You know those hardcore Thai asskicking films which suddenly turn into weepy melodrama and then wacky comedy? Or those endearing Chan-Wook Park films where there’s a bunch of goofy, awkward mugging and then somebody will get raped with a shark and find out they ate their own deformed twin brother who was actually their son by incest? Be thankful it’s not like that. This one merely sets the twin worlds of over-the-top ridiculousness and cornball earnestness side by side, happily dipping into each one at the appropriate time.

"Talk to me, Guz!"

LAST STAND is not exactly lacking in action, but you’d be forgiven for noting that I’m talking about the cast first. For a big dumb action movie, it’s ambitions to be the biggest spectacle on Earth seem surprisingly slight in the wake of the special-effects extravaganzas which have now destroyed Earth wholesale ad nauseum to the point where the full-scale annihilation of mankind has become rote. As the age of machismo died out in the 90s, our expectation of enjoying good action came to be replaced by our expectation of ever-escalating spectacle, and so I think a modest, focused movie like this can come off as underwhelming to some. Shouldn’t there be a gigantic CGI robot with a celebrity voice in there somewhere? I paid my $12, I want to see something that looks ridiculous and expensive!

I think, though, that those who are looking to be entertained rather than overwhelmed will find copious proof that Kim is one of the most intuitively gifted visual filmmakers alive today. Each action sequence is a tightly choreographed, eloquently communicated visual story, making certain to milk every drop of excitement out of the scenario by deftly communicating what’s happening, what’s at stake, and how the relevant players relate to each other spatially and emotionally. In a cinema which is increasingly defined by chaotic, handheld sequences which deliberately try to involve you by not clearly showing you the awesome stuff which may or may not be happening somewhere off camera, Kim manages to make certain you understand the significance of every shot fired, and --crucially-- he manages to do so without seeming the least bit retro or dated. He effortlessly creates dynamic, involving shootouts, car chases, fireballs, and hand-to-hand smackdowns by trusting that we’re actually interested in seeing the action play out, provided it’s stylishly and effectively presented. Even while mostly lacking in gimmicks, THE LAST STAND has a comfortable surfeit of memorable action beats, from the western-style gunslinger battle on main street to the police blockade busted with a semi outfitted like a train to the final, oddball automobile chase through a cornfield in zero visibility. Kim’s so good that it’s easy to forget what an impressive feat it is to successfully manage so many varied action tropes and have them all seem cohesive and exciting.

Arnold subtlety demonstrates his contempt for the subsidized US industrial corn machine.

If you get that right in a movie like this, almost anything can be forgiven. In this case you’re gonna have to overlook a script which seems to be cobbled together from cliches so tired that they’d been rejected by every other movie. I honestly think writer Andrew Knauer (nothing) arrived late to the meeting with his producers only to realize he’d forgotten to bring his copy of the script, so he has to quickly create a new one out of discarded pages from other scripts he found in the trash in the men’s bathroom at Planet Hollywood. Yes, they literally do have a sweet little old lady who whips out a shotgun to blow a baddie away.

Even so, Kim never directs it like it’s anything less than vitally important, and despite a few groaners in there he somehow manages to drag enough life out of these old dogs that they feel classic, rather than absurdly hackneyed. Case in point: there’s a scene in the middle where exactly what you know will happen in order to make the stakes more personal and establish an element of danger, happens. It’s exactly like you already know it will be in absolutely every detail except that it’s treated as a serious, tragic trauma. Arny --just like Gary Cooper in HIGH NOON!-- lowers his head in sorrow, fighting back tears, and then slowly looks back up at the camera. And I suddenly realized I was feeling a twinge of actual emotion in a movie where a mentally ill Johnny Knoxville fires a gattling gun out of a school bus. And Luis Guzman struts down a battle-ravaged main street blowing away anything that moves with a tommy gun. And a guy uses a souped-up racecar as a ramp to jump police SUVs off the road. And Arnold tells a drug dealing Brazilian that “You make us immigrants look bad.”*** And did I mention Peter Stormare talks in a redneck accent? And a guy gets blown up by a flare? And the villain has a butler with a full suit waiting for him to change into while he’s still breaking out of custody? And there’s a car so fast that the cops mistake it for a low-flying airplane.

You know what, America,  this movie is too good for you. Forget I said anything and go back to waiting for another remake of an 80’s TV property.

*Ok, maybe THE RUNDOWN counts. I shouldn’t be so mean.

**Just kidding. This is why it’s important to read footnotes. Actually his name is Ray Owens, which I like for some reason. Arny kind of looks like he could be a Ray, it seems right. But obviously they missed a perfect opportunity to turn the title into a lame pun, and for that reason I’m against it.

***To my knowledge, the only mention of Arny’s history as an immigrant in his entire filmography.

Nowhere to Run

Nowhere to Run (1993)
Dir. Robert Harmon
Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Rosanna Arquette, Joss Ackland, Kieran Culkin, Ted Levine

A perfectly serviceable little action picture from 1993, which again confirms that there was a time when “action” movies were not required to explode a giant robot every few minutes to keep you entertained, and were actually more like dramas with an absurdly overmuscled goofball cast in the lead part. This one has a little more legit action in it than PENTATHLON --including a pretty excellent prison bus breakout at the start and an impressively absurd offroad motorcycle chase at the end -- but is mostly the story of a quiet ex-con finding a simple country family and doing what it takes to put his past behind him and protect them. It kind of reminded me of Seagal’s underrated and poorly named FIRE DOWN BELOW in that if you had cast anyone other than a ridiculous action icon in the lead, people might have reason to take the film seriously.

    Honestly, if you cast Viggo Mortenssen, or, hell, even Liam “Action” Neeson in the Van Damme role, it would probably be called a drama, or at least a thriller. You can even keep the motorcycle chase, and people would just assume it’s a metaphor for his inner conflict about escaping from him past. But with two separate scenes of Van Damme’s nude, spectacularly ripped and completely hairless body emerging from a lake, you’ve got no choice but to call it an action movie. Maybe even an action flick.

    Still, they treat it pretty much like a drama, and most of the tension comes from the narrative drama and not the fights. There’s a pretty good cast. A young Rosanna Arquette (who’s not going to be outdone by Van Damme in the nudity department) a very young Kieran Culkin, LETHAL WEAPON 2’s Joss Ackland, and Buffalo Bill himself, Ted Levine. They’re all around to have drama with things, and do a pretty good job emoting around Van Damme’s flexing.

    Basically, Van Damme is an escaped prisoner (wrongly convicted, though) who falls in with a pretty cattle-farming widow (who it is, exactly, that actually farms the cattle is unclear, since she seems to spend most of her time undressing in front of open windows, being a feisty do-gooder for the neighbors, and reminiscing with her adorable kids about their dead dad). The family is being pressured to sell off their land so evil Joss Ackland can build his evil golf course and ruin their simple country ways. Arquette won’t sell, so Ackland brings in outside muscle in the form of Ted Levine to intimidate her into getting out.

    Levine is an actor who’s been in a ton of stuff, but I never really noticed in a non-woman-suit kind of situation. But he’s great here, taking the intimidating henchman role in a different direction than I’ve seen. He’s got a kind of aw-shucks country charm to him, and it seems kinda genuine. Some of his scenes seem to be the usual veiled-menace threatening scenes, but he’s nothing but bright and charming. Like Albert Brooks in DRIVE, he really seems to want to be your friend, even though he knows he’ll have to get ugly if the situation requires it. This is actually a great tactic to cause tension because it makes you unsure exactly how far he’ll go (although less so here, because it’s an action movie. Come on, is he really going to kill Kieran Culkin?)

Van Damme is pretty good too, in his cartoonish, mulleted way. He doesn’t exactly have to do any hard acting, but he does a good job of at first seeming reserved and on-edge, and then gradually warming up. It’s a simple transition, but one which he sells effectively. Plus he religiously eats only steaks for every meal, which counts as character development on his final scorecard I bet. Holy shit, maybe he’s just in it because she’s some sort of cattle farmer and he thinks if he can get in with her he’ll have easy access to all the steak he wants from now on. I ain’t saying he’s a gold digger... but he ain’t messing with no turnip farmers.   

Anyway, its pretty much a quiet tale of escalating pressure on small-town American by evil corporate interests (or, if you’re Mitt Romney, a tale of class warfare perpetrated against the job creators by illegal foreigners) where sometimes Van Damme kicks some people or jumps a motorcycle over a truck. Given the realities of today’s world, its sort of a nice fantasy to imagine a helpful kickboxing musclebound stranger will come along and give the little guy the power to stand up to the Joss Acklands of the world. But then again, even this film surprisingly acknowledges that fighting them isn’t necessarily going to make your life easy, either. The villains are annoyed at Van Damme and keep reminding him that they’re only escalating things because he stepped in and changed the balance of power. Isn’t that just what they always do, blame you for their bad behavior just because you didn’t immediately give them exactly what they want. Same everywhere, man. But in the Van Dammaverse, you can actually win. Yeah, it may be a little ridiculous, but these days we need a little action to make the drama go down easier.

Pentathlon

Pentathlon (1994)
Dir. Bruce Malmuth
Starring Dolph Lundgren, David Soul, Roger E. Mosely

I hesitate to call this 1994 time capsule featuring Dolph Lundgren as a Down-On-His-Luck-East-German-Pentathlon-Gold-Medalist-Defector/Fry-Cook an action movie, for one reason and one reason only. There’s virtually no action in it. There’s one chase scene at the very beginning of the film, a short sword fight halfway through, and a small explosion near the end, but that’s all you get. I’m betting the real Dolph Lundgren sees more action before breakfast than he does in the entire runtime of this thing. But that’s OK, because it’s kind of a nice reminder that one year before Michael Bay landed on the American movie scene like a albatross bowel movement from 1000 feet, there was a place for action movies that were actually pretty much dramas about macho men. I vividly remember being extremely confused by all the crying and talking the first time I watched FIRST BLOOD in my youth. Why are they telling us a story when they should be exploding?

    The answer is --gather round, boys and girls, ol’ grandpa Subtlety is gonna tell you a story -- that long, long ago, people were actually entertained by stories which are interesting. I understand that now a youtube video which doesn’t demonstrate the cruel depths of human suffering or cats doing funny things within the first nanosecond qualifies as a crime against humanity, worthy of writing an impassioned, strongly worded 100 characters. But back in the time of the dinosaurs, sometimes you could get your brain to focus for a period of many minutes in a row on Dolph Lundgren’s quest to get his life back together with the help of his tough but zany former Fry Cook Manager (Roger E. Mosely, who played Leadbelly in LEADBELLY).

    Basically, Dolph is an East German kid, coached to Olympic greatness by his brutal neo-Nazi coach Muller* (David Soul, who I guess was Hutch from “Starksy and Hutch.” Turns out Mosely was a guest star on that show, too, so happy birthday to you Starsky and Hutch reunion fans**). Fed up with the win-at-all-costs tactics of his team (his coach is furious at him for refusing to take steroids), Dolph defects to America right after his gold metal win, but gets himself shot in the leg in the process. Also his best friend gets shot and his ex-coach goes crazy and beats his father to death. But then a gorgeous American Olympian takes him in and presumably fucks him into next week (it's called loving freedom. Deal with it, fascists!). So, a real roller coaster of a day.

    Anyway, Dolph is flaunting his cartoonish teutonic charm all over the Free World (just like Neil Young would do), when suddenly he happens to glance at the TV and, holy shit, the Berlin wall is down. He could have waited two fucking months and been out anyway! That fucks him up pretty bad, and he goes on a downward spiral for a few off-screen years until we catch up with him as a fuckup irresponsible alchoholic loner doing a shitty job as a cook at a dive diner in LA (in other words, he bottomed out with a setup that pretty much describes the pinnacle of my life so far).

In order to emphasize this character transition, Dolph underwent a startling physical transformation. He lived the part off-stage, eating poorly, getting drunk, sitting on the couch, growing a beard, and gaining 60 pounds of pure gut. Just kidding, he’s still Dolph so even with a dirty apron on he looks like such a hilariously exaggerated ubermensch that even Nietzche would have to laugh. When his manager (Dolph’s, not Neitzche’s) discovers that his surly, unreliable employee is an ex-Olympic gold medalist, he resolved to pull his German ass out of its current funk and get him back to the top of his game. But little does he realize that Muller is now in America, ostensibly to do some kind of neo-Nazi chicanery, but possibly also to settle a personal score with his old pupil.

  The film would be pretty forgettable were it not for the surprisingly strong performances by Dolph and David Soul. There’s not a lot of action here, so the tension has to come from the characters themselves, and whaddayaknow, they actually deliver. Dolph isn’t going to win an Olympic gold (maybe a bronze) for his acting, but he has a certain disarming charm which makes us root for him. It’s not exactly a layered performance, but then again, it’s not exactly a layered character anyway -- he’s a big chiseled lunkhead who happens to have some weird drama happen to him and always tries to do the right thing. Opposite that is David Soul as the psychotic obsessed Nazi coach. Would you believe that it’s a great fucking performance? As twisted as he is, Muller considers himself a father to Dolph’s Eric, and feels both deeply betrayed and fiercely proud of him. Soul somehow manages to convey all that with his performance, making you sort of feel for Muller even as you are repulsed by him. Soul’s manic, conflicted intensity makes him a pretty compelling screen villain and ups the tension considerably. And putting him at odds with Dolph’s simplistic nice-guy hunk makes him seem all the more perverse. It’s a seriously good performance and dynamic which decisively elevates an OK film to a pretty good one.

Director Bruce Malmuth (who directed one of Seagal’s more entertaining joints, HARD TO KILL, and the classic Sylvester Stallone cross-dressing terrorist epic NIGHTHAWKS) doesn’t do anything too special here, but the whole thing is professionally assembled. It’s a silly film, but he shoots it like a real movie and, with the help of the actors, finds the right tone of somewhat cartoonish earnestness. It may be a sports movie with almost no sports and an action movie with almost no action, but it sort of has heart. And for this old luddite, that counts for a lot.

*That’s actually Mu:ller with an umlaut, just in case you had any doubts that he was evil. Not sure how to format that, so use your imagination, and maybe even throw in an extra umlaut or two just to really drive the point home. 

**Wouldn't it be great if they also got Starsky as Dolph's murdered father? I'd definitely buy a special edition where they went back and put him in there, kind of a setting-history-right thing. Inventor of the time machine, do this before you worry about stopping Hitler (besides, if you stopped Hitler Soul wouldn't be able to play a psychotic Neo-Nazi here, and then this movie wouldn't be as great. So let's just fix this casting Starsky thing and then leave causality to the pros).

Vern reviewed this one awhile back, and as usual puts all other reviews to shame -- Read it here