Not in his town - The Last Stand review

Its light praise to say a film is good for what it is but one suited for the solo return of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Last Stand. It has very much been marketed as Schwarzenegger’s movie but for cineastes The Last Stand marked one of South Korea’s finest talents making his mark on American soil. Yes, for what it is (a big, dumb Schwarzenegger vehicle) its good fun but for what it could have been (Kim Jee-woon following on from Korean masterpieces, A Bittersweet Life and I Saw the Devil, it cripplingly under delivers on showing America how to do action.

'Why am I in a film with him?' ponders Arnie. 

The Last Stand is a stylishly mounted film but lacks the sizzling insanity of Jee-woon’s last action-western, The Good, The Bad and The Weird, and settles for something more generic. Largely the film skips along at a good trot but any personality and creativity saps from the screen when attention is given to wildly irrelevant sub-plots and characters. There are flares of inventive bloodletting and vaguely amusing one-liners and sight gags but nothing to rival “Let off some steam, Bennett” (Commando), “Hasta la vista, baby” (T2), “Consider that a divorce” (Total Recall)… The list really does go on.

The problem at the core of The Last Stand is that it does feel like the director has compromised for a mainstream western audience. There are good set pieces in the film, a visceral mano-a-mano showdown reassures that the Governor can still trade blows with the best of them, however it feels as though the great content in the film is somewhat obscured by the bland and generic. This is directly mirrored by the climactic car chase taking place in a corn field, stripping away any sense of scale or appreciation for the choreography. Take it for what it really is; a run-of-the-mill, meat and veg shoot-em-up that just happens to star old man Schwarzenegger and you will be pleasantly entertained. Go in expecting what it could and should have been and you’ll leave vastly unfulfilled.