Trouble in a Small Town

There was a time, during the 1980s and early 1990s, when the two biggest stars in Hollywood were Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. These two had a (at times) friendly rivalry, each trying to compete to have the biggest film, make the biggest money, be the brightest star. Stallone, of course, hit it big with two iconic roles that would come to define his career: John Rambo and Rocky Balboa. Schwarzenegger, though, I think had the more diverse and more interesting career of the two. While they each had plenty of one-off films that they made, you can point to more Schwarzenegger films that have stood the test of time without having to be part of a franchise. Most people aren’t holding up Cliffhanger, Over the Top, or Demolition Man for high praise, much to Stallone’s chagrin, I’m sure, but movies like Total Recall, True Lies, and The Running Man are still very much enjoyed to this day, giving Schwarzenegger the clear edge.

Naturally, as the decades wore on both stars saw their place in Hollywood fade. You can only be the biggest star in the land for so long, a lesson most Hollywood actors have learned to their shock and regret. Stallone continued to try and make big films, swearing off action and then coming back to it time and again, while Arnold went and became governor of California. But you could tell both of them wanted to reclaim their former glory, and they each tried to pick projects that would propel them out again. For Schwarzenegger, after being the Governator for eight years (until he was term-limited), his first big move (after cameoing in Stallone’s Expendables films) was to head up an action blockbuster, and he signed on for The Last Stand.

We’ll cut to the chase: while it’s likely that The Last Stand was made because Schwarzenegger signed on, it’s also the case that the film failed to light the world on fire despite (or maybe because) the Governator was attached. He’d been out of the spotlight, as an actor, for years at that point and I doubt many people were super excited to see him back on the big screen. While he had a solid run of films in the 1980s and 1990s, his later output (before running for governor) was decidedly more mixed. Batman & Robin, End of Days, Collateral Damage – a string of failures that tarnished his once bright star. People had become tired of Schwarzenegger’s schtick, their tastes moving on to a different kind of action spectacle that just wasn’t in Arnold’s wheelhouse.

That’s a problem for The Last Stand because it very much plays like an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle from the heyday of his career. It’s full of jokey one-liners, silly characters, and implausible situations, all topped with action that is clearly trying to edit around the fact that the actors on screen can’t actually perform any of the stunts in question. It’s a far cry from the grounded realism of the Jason BourneLost without his memory, but bearing a particular set of skills, Jason Bourne has to figure out who he is and just why everyone seems to want him dead. films, or the all-out action of John Wick (which came out just a year later). In comparison to those franchises, The Last Stand is a quaint throwback that just couldn't grab the attention of audiences. It was a bygone movie for a bygone era.

The film stars Schwarzenegger as Ray Owens as the sheriff of a little town on the US/Mexico border, Summerton Junction, AZ. Most of the denizens of Summerton have left for the weekend, attending a big football game between the local high school team and their rivals in another town. That leaves Owens and his deputies – Jaimie Alexander as Deputy Sarah Torrance, Luis Guzmán as Deputy Mike Figuerola, and Zach Gilford as Deputy Jerry Bailey – to watch over a peaceful town when no one is around and where barely anything ever happens even on a busy day. The worst they have to deal with is Sarah’s ex-boyfriend, Frank Martinez (Rodrigo Santoro), drunk and in a holding tank, as well as the town gun-collecting looney, Lewis Dinkum (Johnny Knoxville).

Or at least that’s what they think. While Owens and his crew are settling in for a quiet weekend, an FBI team, headed by Agent John Bannister (Forest Whitaker), have to move a high-value prisoner. Drug cartel head Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) is one of the most dangerous mo-fos around, and the last thing Bannister needs is for him to make an escape. Which is exactly what he does, with the help of his crew. Cortez makes off in an aftermarket-boosted Corvette, and the FBI is left holding their collective dicks. And once it’s clear that Cortez’s men are bunkered down in Summerton Junction’s outskirts, and that the kingpin is headed their way, the only people that can stop him are Owens and his deputies.

Let’s be clear: there’s nothing inherently wrong with The Last Stand. It’s the kind of film that, if it had been released in 1993 instead of 2013, likely would have been a massive hit with action movie fans. It has a lot going for it, from a game cast, to solid production values, and decent actors doing what they can with a threadbare but workable story. The film is a fairly low-stakes, low-impact action film, but it's just the kind of thing that padded Arnold’s resume and made him a huge action star for nearly two decades. It’s just that it came out in the wrong decade.

The charm of The Last Stand is that it knows how to have a lot of fun with its goofy premise. The script is packed with weird characters, like Lewis Dinkum, and silly lines, enough so that it’s hard to take anything else seriously. This is added to by the comedians starring in the film, like Guzmán and Knoxville, that clearly were hired to help punch up the laughs, keeping it all from getting too serious. And then you have weird performances, like Peter Stormare playing the head of Cortez’s team, Thomas Burrell, and the actor puts on one of the worst good old boy accents I’ve ever heard. He had to know it was bad, and he went with it because it was funny.

Nothing about this film can be taken seriously, despite the fact that the script desperately wants us to buy into the idea that Cortez is the worst of the worst, a monster in human form that should never be allowed to roam free. It tells us, over and over, that Cortez is a bad dude (although, to the detriment of the film, it never really shows us anything to back this up) but then the film undercuts this by trying to make everything light and silly and fun. It wants to have it both ways, to be a low-stakes action film but also a grand epic about the law taking on the worst criminal the world has ever seen. It’s unable to sustain both aspects of the movie; something had to give.

On top of that, let’s be honest, Schwarzenegger is not exactly at the top of his game here. While he can handle a low-stakes film like this with just charisma alone, his line readings feel stilted and off. He doesn’t sound like a real person, instead almost as if he’s reading lines from cue cards instead. Most of the time it’s clear he isn’t doing any of his own stunts, that everything is done via stunt men or green screen. Which, sure, the man was 65 at the time of release and everyone gets old, but you can’t be the action star you once were. Expecting audiences to show up for watered down action is just silly, and that’s most of what this film provides.

And yet, I still find myself enjoying The Last Stand. It’s a total throwback, silly and weirdly over-the-top, without ever finding its proper tone. And yet, it’s still vastly more watchable than most of what I end up seeing for this site. Hell this is still a better film than at least three of the five Rambo films I had to recently suffer through, and I’d happily go back and watch The Last Stand again (something I will never say for Rambo: Last Blood). As far as vehicles for aging action stars go, this film is actually pretty fun, a decent little watch to help kill a weekend afternoon.

Is it a good film? Absolutely not. There’s a reason it bombed in theaters (only making $48.3 Mil against its $45 Mil budget). It’s messy, it has a weak script, bad dialogue, and a plot that just doesn’t really hang together. But it is fun, and fun goes a long way. Bad movies can be enjoyable in their own right, and this is the right kind of bad movie to keep audiences coming back, years down the road. It might have come out in the wrong era to be a success, but it still has plenty of fun moments to make it a worthy addition to any Schwarzenegger collection.