LAST MAN STANDING—-the resume of director Walter Hill includes classics like Hard Times, The Warriors, Southern Comfort, The Long Riders and 48 Hours. It also hauls slop like Red Heat, Johnny Handsome and Another 48 Hours. This awful 1996 actioner belongs in the second group. A reworking of the Kurosawa saga Yojimbo, with borrowing from A Fistful Of Dollars, it’s 101 pointless minutes of glum ugliness, endless bloody violence and dumb posturing. I can take a lot of dude v. dude gunfire but this left me wanting to visit a shrink.
Prohibition times, 1932, somewhere in Texas. Terse drifter Bruce Willis pits the two gangs that run the town (with no ordinary residents) against each other and they kill everyone in sight: the End.
Humorless dreck cost $$67,000,000 (Bruce alone caging $16,500,000) and bombed, earning only $18,000,000 in the States, $47,300,000 globally. Willis is so terse he’s almost inert. Reviews were suitably brutal.
With Bruce Dern, William Sanderson, Christopher Walken, David Patrick Kelly, Karina Lombard, Michael Imperioli. Reload, Walter.