Last Man Standing

One of my all-time favorite movies is the Sergio Leone spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars.  There's just something innately appealing about a cocky loner who knows exactly how bad-ass he is.  When I realized that Leone stole his plot from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, I went out of my way to find that movie.  It turns out that it is awesome, too.  Go figure, a legendary director made a good movie.  So, when I found Last Man Standing, which takes Yojimbo's plot and appears to give it a noir spin, I figured it was a can't miss scenario.  Apparently, only awesome directors can make good movies from this story.

The obviously alias-using John Smith (Bruce Willis) enters the border town of Jericho, Texas sometime during Prohibition.  The town is virtually deserted of decent folk.  The only normal people left are the wimpy sheriff (Bruce Dern), a kooky bartender (William Sanderson), and the town undertaker.  The only other people in town are split between two warring gangs, the Strozzi gang and the Doyle gang.  Smith happens to be ridiculously proficient with his handguns, and not very shy about demonstrating his talents.  With two violently opposed sides, Smith sees an opportunity to play both sides against the middle and make a lot of money in the process.  In short time, the bodies start piling up and both sides are clamoring for Smith's services.  But how long can one man manipulate so many violent people?

It's a pretty basic plot, and it's been done before.  How is Last Man Standing supposed to stand out from its predecessors?  Well, if nothing else, this movie has more recognizable actors in it that its more famous fore-bearers.  Bruce Willis is decent as the quiet tough guy; you've seen Willis as an action hero before, but this script is pretty devoid of quips, so he just has to look tough.  He does that.  He also looks tired, and I'm not sure if that was an intentional choice.  Bruce Dern and William Sanderson were okay as morally neutral supporting characters, but Dern could have done a lot more with his character and Sanderson's wackiness was occasionally annoying.  As far as the gangsters went, Michael Imperioli got to be a whiny Italian mobster; this movie does show how far he came before The Sopranos started, but it's a role he has played many times in his career.  David Patrick Kelly wasn't bad as Doyle, but he didn't have much of a character to play; he wasn't psychotic, for a change, though.  On the other hand, he's only entertaining when he's psychotic.

Bruce Willis, come out to PLAAEEEEEEAAAAYYYY!

Christopher Walken is the only man in town who is in Smith's league, as far as being dangerous goes.  This sounds like an easy role for Walken, but they decided to give him some scarring and a weird voice, so all his typical awesomeness is lost as he whispered all his lines.  You might also recognize R.D. Call as a frequent supporting gangster or Leslie Mann as a hooker, but neither is particularly compelling.

How can you screw up a villainous Walken?!?

But back to Walken.  How do you make a movie with one of the most audibly distinct actors of this era and mangle his voice?  That's like making a Megan Fox movie that doesn't treat her like an object.  That's like having Fred Astaire acting in a wheelchair.  That's like forcing Jean-Claude Van Damme to not do a roundhouse kick-to-the-face in a movie.  In other words, it's not the way the world should work, people.  You know what would have been a better choice for this movie?  Having him talk like any of these people:

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Walken's voice isn't the only odd thing about Last Man Standing.  Director and writer Walter Hill made several bizarre choices as he adapted this classic Kurosawa story.  It starts with the narration.  Smith is a man of few words, so having him narrate the story seems a bit unnatural.  His narration is barely inflected, too, so it sounds like he's bored as he explains himself.  And, even though Smith is narrating his own story, he doesn't actually give the viewer any insight into his grand schemes.  Any one of those aspects would make the narration bad, but all together they make for some painful viewing.  Beyond the narration, there is a matter of the action.  Yes, there is a lot of action, in the form of gunfights, in this movie.  Some of it is okay.  The rest is either exaggerated or simply dull.  I'm not a stickler for realism in my super-violent gunfights, but even I can tell when something is blatantly wrong.  I don't know much about guns, but I find it hard to believe that Smith's two handguns could lift any grown man off his feet with a blast to the chest.  And he must have had magical magazine clips for his guns, since they only ran out after he finished killing everyone.

His guns are powered by male pattern baldness.

There's plenty of other dumb stuff, too --- why did the guys at the beginning, who wanted Smith to leave town, ruin his car?  When the bad guys get the upper hand, why don't they kill Smith?  They know everything he knows.  Why are armed men immune to Tommy gun bullets?  To be honest, none of that is terribly important, because the entertainment stops well before any of those questions start to bug the logic center of your brain.

Here's a Google image I found looking for "last man standing."  This picture is more entertaining than this movie.

Last Man Standing has a solid story at its core, but making the lead character tired and humorless doesn't bring out the best in the script.  I love the story this screenplay is based on.  I like movies where gangs fight each other.  I like tough guys that narrate their stories and kill lots of mean people.  But I need to enjoy watching it.  This movie is dreary and emotionless.  The action is nothing special, so the one saving grace it might have had amounts to nothing.  I know that Bruce Willis is not in consistently good movies, but I'm not usually bored watching him; when you take away his smirk and quips, though, you're not left with much to watch.  I was hoping that this would be an underappreciated gem with its pedigree, but this film is just poor.

And, just because this movie depressed me, here's something to cheer me up.  Yes, that's Sharon Stone.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

It has been pointed out by my friends at No Bulljive that I have not reviewed a whole lot of science fiction movies yet, so I figured that I should begin to amend that with one of the greats.  Sure, I could ridicule Battlefield Earth (which is in my bottom 3 movies of all time) or Alien: Resurrection (which might join that elite company if I can ever sit through it again), but I want to start the New Year off right, or at least happily.

Blade Runner is based on a Philip K. Dick novel, the first of many of Dick works to be adapted for the big screen.  In 2019 Los Angeles, the world (or LA, at least) is a very different place.  For starters, American culture in Los Angeles appears on the verge of being consumed by Japanese culture.  There are other little things, too, like flying cars and space colonies, but the big difference between here and now and 2019 is the existence of replicants.  Replicants are genetically engineered beings that look like fully grown humans, but can have superior intelligence, strength, or appearances; since they are potentially so powerful and nearly indistinguishable from humans, replicants are outlawed on Earth, and can only live in the space colonies.  When some replicants steal a spaceship (killing every human aboard) and head to Los Angeles, what are the local police to do?

Yeeeah!

That's where Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) steps in.  Deckard is a retired police officer that is cajoled/politely blackmailed into service by his former boss, Bryant (M. Emmett Walsh).  Deckard is the best around and the only man to rival his skill as a Blade Runner (replicant identifier/hunter) was murdered by one of the replicants.  Deckard decides to go to the source of the replicants, the Tyrell Corporation, and speak to Tyrell himself (Joe Turkel).  To give Deckard an idea of what he is dealing with, Tyrell has him perform the standard "are you a replicant?" test on his assistant, Rachael (Sean Young); the test is supposed to determine how empathetic, and therefore human, the subject is.  It usually takes only a couple dozen questions to identify a replicant, but it took almost a hundred before Deckard was sure that Rachael was a replicant...and that she thought she was human.  Tricky!  The rest of the film follows Deckard on the trail of the replicants as they track down whatever it is they are in town for. 

Blade Runner is, in a very literal way, a detective story, but there's a lot more depth to it than you might expect from a typical crime and capture tale.  First off, Blade Runner is an excellent example of modern noir; the story is plot-driven, the characters are unemotional, and the film is full of shadows.  There is also a healthy dose of paranoia in the movie, as the other characters all seem to know something Deckard does not.  I think that the film's strength lies in its storytelling; the plot is pretty clear and the story has a satisfactory ending, but there are subtleties to the script that add ambiguity to certain issues and raise questions about others.  The obvious question (that I don't want to spoil for you), "Is Deckard a replicant?" can be argued convincingly from both sides, and I think that's pretty cool.  It's nice to see a science fiction movie that is not about a dystopian future, but is instead a story merely set in the future.  After all, the future can't always suck.

The performances in this film are generally pretty good.  Harrison Ford is a likable tough guy and I enjoy watching him play intelligent characters.  Rutger Hauer definitely had the meatiest supporting role; he was genuinely unsettling, playing such a calm and collected character with such rage inside him.  Most of the other actors served their purpose, but some of them had just a little touch of something special.  Sean Young had a bizarre hairstyle and made the most of her character's subtle, but complicated emotions; Edward James Olmos could have been a stereotypical cop, but they gave him a bizarre 2019 language to speak, a blend of English, Japanese, and (I think) a Slavic language; William Sanderson was surrounded by a creepy assortment of "living" toys; even Daryl "I'm a better actress when I don't speak" Hannah had some very interesting makeup.  The rest of the cast is noteworthy, but James Hong, Brion James, and Joe Turkel didn't add anything special to their roles.

Ridley Scott did a fantastic job coming up with this futuristic world.  Sure, he handled the actors well enough (particularly Hauer and Young), but the details that went into this movie are most impressive.  It's hard to put a finger on exactly what details stand out, though.  The weird Olmos language is certainly one, as is the Japanification of LA (if they really have street-side Asian noodle stands in 2019, I'm moving West!), but even the building designs are noticeably out-of-time, but still plausible.  I also liked the use of space to convey tone; busy streets sometimes helped develop a feeling of confusion or panic, but empty streets or rooms could imply danger, loneliness, or power.  Scott has an excellent eye for cinematography, so it shouldn't be surprising that the film looks great.

I should point out that this version of Blade Runner is the most recent version to be released; all in all, there are four cuts of the film available on DVD (all in the same package, too), with three or four other cuttings floating around somewhere.  The Final Cut makes some pretty significant changes to the original theatrical film, and many of the changes are noticeable from the Director's Cut, too.  I will tell you right now, though, not to waste your first viewing of Blade Runner on anything but The Final Cut.  The picture is far clearer than the previous versions, many technical problems are cleaned up, and several previously ambiguous moments are given clearer direction.  Each version of the movie is interesting, but The Final Cut is clearly the best of the bunch. 

It's difficult for me to explain exactly why Blade Runner impresses me so much.  It's well-shot, well-acted, and well-produced, it has depth and subtlety and a few "what the hell?" moments that make sense only if you choose to put some thought into the movie.  Plus, it inspired some of the lyrics to White Zombie's "More Human Than Human."  Yeah, that must be why this is a classic.  Yeeeeah!