The Last Stand

Filmmaker Jee-woon Kim’s North American debut, The Last Stand details the chaos that ensues after a notorious drug kingpin (Eduardo Noriega’s Gabriel Cortez) busts out of prison and heads towards a sleepy border town called Sommerton Junction – where the local sheriff (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Ray Owens), along with a handful of scrappy deputies, subsequently prepares to battle Cortez and his soldiers. It’s a well-worn yet promising setup that is, at the outset, employed to pleasingly watchable effect by Kim, as the director, working from Andrew Knauer’s screenplay, does a nice job of establishing the aforementioned small community and its various residents – with Schwarzenegger’s subdued yet charismatic turn as the film’s reluctant protagonist certainly standing as an obvious highlight. It’s only with the head-scratching left turn into Cortez’s escape, a long, tedious sequence that seems to go on forever, that The Last Stand begins to lose its grip on the viewer, with the total needlessness of this stretch wreaking havoc on the narrative’s momentum and triggering the movie’s shift from passable to distressingly interminable. The lackluster vibe is perpetuated by Kim’s aggressively slick directorial sensibilities, with, especially, the garish digital cinematography and overuse of computer-generated effects resulting in an overly polished atmosphere that proves disastrous (ie the film’s action sequences are, for the most part, drained of their vitality and energy). And although the final fight between Schwarzenegger and Noriega’s respective characters is rather exhilarating, The Last Stand is, primarily, an overlong and erratically-paced misfire that’s simply not in the same league as Schwarzenegger’s past efforts within the action genre.

** out of ****