LAST MAN STANDING: A Blood-Drenched Elegy For Cinematic Machismo

It’s hard to find a good tough-guy movie nowa­days.  The block­buster men­tal­ity that dri­ves mod­ern major-studio think­ing just isn’t inter­ested in it.  When action flicks that might have worked as tough-guy fare do pop up, they’ve had any poten­tial rough edges sanded off in hopes of mak­ing said films as eas­ily digestible to as many kinds of view­ers as pos­si­ble.  Even worse, the action stars of old have been replaced with marketing-approved young faces that can bring in a broader, safer demo­graphic (in other words, we won’t be see­ing a new Charles Bronson any­time soon).

Tough-guy movies died out some­where in the mid-1990’s for a num­ber of rea­sons in addi­tion to the block­buster men­tal­ity out­lined above: ris­ing bud­gets, the migra­tion of viewer inter­est and the fact that a lot of tough-guy stars were try­ing to break into other gen­res to keep up with shift­ing demo­graph­ics (remem­ber the com­edy phases that Schwazenegger and Stallone went through?).  Bruce Willis was one of the last hold­outs, as evi­denced by his 1996 release Last Man Standing.  At the time, it seemed like lit­tle more than a pro­gram­mer.  By mod­ern stan­dards, it plays like an elegy for tough-guy filmmaking.

Walter Hill’s screen­play uses Yojimbo for its tem­plate — even cred­it­ing the orig­i­nal writ­ers in its cred­its — and mixes in spaghetti west­ern and gang­ster flick motifs as it tells the story of loner/drifter/badass “John Smith” (Willis).  Smith is on his way to Mexico when he stops in the Texas bor­der town of Jericho.  Always on the look­out for a few extra bucks, he quickly gets him­self caught in the mid­dle of a boot­leg­ging war between an Italian gang led by Strozzi (Ned Eisenberg) and an Irish gang led by Doyle (David Patrick Kelly).

In the best Yojimbo/A Fistful Of Dollars style, Smith plays both ends against the mid­dle in hopes of a big score.  Fate adds the req­ui­site com­pli­ca­tions in the form of two trapped women — Doyle’s enslaved, half-breed wife Felina (Karina Lombard) and Strozzi’s mouthy moll Lucy (Alexandra Powers) — and Hickey (Christopher Walken), the griz­zled button-man for Doyle who is instantly sus­pi­cious of Smith.  It’s inevitable that things won’t end well or neatly for any­one involved and plenty of bul­lets and beat­ings splash across the screen before we reach the end credits.

If you want to pick apart Last Man Standing, it’s easy to do.  It is nei­ther as focused or pre­cise as Yojimbo or A Fistful Of Dollars.  It has a voiceover that is mostly super­flu­ous and an under­whelm­ing third act that chases its tail before end­ing in a hastily-staged sort of way that is odds with the elab­o­rate buildup of its two pre­ced­ing acts (word has it that the film’s orig­i­nal coda was blood­ier, meaner and more testosterone-drenched).  Women will most likely hate it because the female char­ac­ter­i­za­tions are all paper-thin, either serv­ing as madon­nas or whores to suit the needs of its mucho-macho mindset.

However, those caveats — legit­i­mate as they might be — fall by the way­side if one looks at Last Man Standing as an exer­cise in tough-guy atti­tude.  It’s as hard­boiled and un-p.c. as they come, deliv­er­ing a steady stream of action set­pieces interspersed with tough talk so over the top it bor­ders on the homo­erotic.  They really don’t make ‘em like this any­more, at least at the main­stream mul­ti­plex level, and fans of the form will be savor­ing every griz­zled moment.

Willis is a tremen­dous amount of fun to watch as he slugs shots of whiskey, deliv­ers all his lines in a gruff whis­per and fires off an arsenal’s worth of bul­lets into any­one who crosses him (why use one bul­let when you have a full clip?).  Walken has a blast as Willis’s neme­sis and hams it up in his oth­er­worldly Method-actor style: his best bit arrives when he responds to a bit of news he doesn’t like by shoot­ing up the room with a tommy gun.  Eisenberg and Kelly do fine work as the hard-driving bosses, with Kelly being unex­pect­edly sym­pa­thetic as the lovelorn king­pin who doesn’t under­stand that you can’t black­mail a woman into lov­ing you.

Elsewhere, Bruce Dern sleazes his way through a role as a cor­rupt sher­iff and Wiliam Sanderson does his patented good-natured hill­billy rou­tine as the town’s bar­keep –and look for a pre-Sopranos Michael Imperioli as Strozzi’s hot­headed cousin.  The women get less time and sub­stance to work with but Lombard shows an ethe­real grace as the story’s “bird in a gilded cage” and Powers man­ages to wring a bit of sym­pa­thy from her role as a moll who is in over her head: her last scene is oddly mov­ing.  Fans of Judd Apatow’s work will either be amused or hor­ri­fied by the pres­ence of his wife/regular actor Leslie Mann as a motor-mouthed hooker who gets thor­oughly man­han­dled by the film’s tough guys.

However, the most impor­tant ele­ment of Last Man Standing is Walter Hill’s direc­tion.  His script might be a bit ram­shackle in parts but his work behind the cam­era is noth­ing short of stun­ning: he uses Lloyd Ahern’s sharp pho­tog­ra­phy to achieve a dusty, sun­bleached look that matches its retro mood and chore­o­graphs the bru­tal­ity with sadis­tic élan.  A good exam­ple of his approach is an early scene where Smith squares off with one of Doyle’s goons: he doesn’t just put a bul­let in him — he shoots the guy so many times that he does back­wards som­er­saults out the saloon doors.  It’s also worth not­ing that this film has some of the loud­est gun­shots you’ll ever hear in a film.

In short, Last Man Standing is a lov­ably black-hearted throw­back to the bad ol’ days when men’s men were allowed to slaugh­ter their way across the sil­ver screen with impunity.  If only we knew how good we had it back then…