The Last Stand

The Last Stand - Dir. Kim Ji-woon (2013)

"How are you, Sheriff?"

"Old."

Well, he said, he'd be back. After serving two terms as the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger returns to the silver screen with The Last Stand. It's his first starring role since Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003.

Arnold is Ray Owens, a former LAPD officer now working as the sheriff of sleepy Summerton Junction, located near the border of Arizona and Mexico. Away from big city life, Owens' main problem is the obnoxious mayor constantly parking his Camaro in a fire zone. Those peaceful and tranquil days are over when notorious drug lord Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) escapes from FBI custody. Grabbing a female agent (Genesis Rodriguez) hostage, Cortez races to the border at over 200mph in a modified Corvette ZR1. Cortez already has a small army waiting for him near Summerton building a bridge across a canyon to escape into Mexico. The only ones that can stop him are Owens and his ragtag bunch of deputies (Zach Gilford, Jaimie Alexander, Luis Guzman), a war vet (Rodrigo Santoro) sleeping it off in their jail cell, and a local nutcase named Lewis Dinkum (Johnny Knoxville).

Arnold never was the most talented thespian, but he succeeded because of his charisma and undeniable screen presence. Neither of those things has dulled even in his sixties. Sure, he's older, a little less mobile, and his one-liners don't have the same zing they used to. "You fucked up my day off," won't go down in movie history the way, "Hasta la vista, baby" did. Still, he's pretty damned entertaining. The Last Stand doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that we are dealing with an aging Arnold as he assumes the kind of grizzled role Clint Eastwood might have.

The script was penned by Andrew Knauer with rewrites by Jeffrey Nachmanoff (The Day After Tomorrow) and George Nolfi (The Adjustment Bureau) to tailor the project once Arnold signed on. The story is a modern day equivalent of Rio Bravo while trading on the usual clichés and narrative formulas of the action genre. The supporting cast is filled with archetypes including the eager to please rookie thirsting for more action and the chronic underachiever who must rise to the occasion. And The Last Stand may have gone overboard in giving Arnold two comic relief sidekicks in the form of Luis Guzman (at his most Luis Guzman) and Johnny Knoxville. While Eduardo Noriega doesn't make the most memorable villain, he does have Peter Stormare as his lead henchman. Stormare is always fun as a bad guy and his inexplicable attempt at a southern accent is hilarious. Unfortunately, the movie grinds to a halt whenever it cuts to the FBI control room where Forest Whitaker proves his tactical genius by shouting, "Find him," and "Do it now," at his underlings.

You don't go to a movie like The Last Stand for emotional character development. As a solid action movie, it doesn't disappoint. The credit goes to Kim Ji-woon who makes in his first American directorial effort. Kim leads a South Korean invasion to Hollywood with Park Chan-wook's Stoker seeing release in March and Bong Joon-ho arriving later in the year with Snowpiercer. Anyone who has seen Kim's The Good, the Bad, and the Weird or I Saw the Devil might go into The Last Stand with high expectations. However, none of the action sequences ever match up to the wild inventiveness seen in either of those pictures. Yet, it never feels as if Kim were handcuffed the way. Cortez's daring escape with a giant magnet is well-staged and the climactic confrontation is riddled with cool moments such as Arnold tackles a man off a roof and shoots him in the head in mid-air and the best use of a flare gun ever committed to film. Then, there's a great car chase with Owens and Cortez playing cat and mouse through a corn field.

The Last Stand's release is rather untimely with the debate on gun control raging across the country. This isn't just because of the violence, but also because much of the humor is derived from Knoxville's character as a gun collecting loony who has found various ways to skirt government regulations. But, The Last Stand is so silly and inconsequential, it could hardly be taken seriously the way Zero Dark Thirty ignited discussions about torture.

Arnold's star power has lost its luster over the years. In the 80's, The Last Stand may have opened to big numbers. Today, the film opened in 9^th place with a paltry $6.2 million. Maybe The Last Stand will find its audience on DVD because it is incredibly fun with an action-packed third act.

Rating: *** (*****)

Rango

Rango - Dir. Gore Verbinski (2011)

Imagine if Hunter S. Thompson and Sergio Leone dropped acid together and had a baby. That mutant freak baby would probably be Rango. Throw in healthy doses of Salvador Dali and Tex Avery and you have an animated film that stands apart from the homogenized CG kids movies flooding multiplexes across the country.

Johnny Depp has been praised for his chameleon-like qualities as an actor so it comes as no surprise when he's called upon to play an actual chameleon. As the titular Rango, he is a pet lizard (with a flair for the theatrical) living inside a glass aquarium struggling to define his own identity. When we meet Rango, he is performing Shakespeare with his only friends a dead fly, a plastic wind-up fish named Mr. Timms, and the naked torso of a Barbie doll. Oh, the movie hasn't even begun to get weird yet.

A car accident sends the aquarium tumbling out of the car where it's smashed into a million pieces across the asphalt road. Rango finds himself lost in the middle of the desert and the first creature he comes across is a Don Quixote-esque armadillo named Roadkill (Alfred Molina). He is so named because he was clearly run over by a car, yet somehow survived. Practically bisected, the poor armadillo still has the tire marks across his flattened stomach. Nope, the movie gets weirder still.

Rango wanders through the scorching desert and finds a dusty Old West town appropriately named Dirt. Through sheer dumb luck, he kills a predatory hawk plaguing the town and re-imagines himself (like any good chameleon) as a deadly gunfighter and becomes the sheriff of Dirt. Rango also romances Beans (Isla Fisher), a desert iguana prone to random spells of catatonia. Her farmland is sought after by the seemingly benevolent Mayor of Dirt, a wheelchair bound desert tortoise voiced by Ned Beatty. It shouldn't be much of a spoiler that the Mayor will be revealed as primary antagonist since Beatty also portrayed the similar Lotso Hugging Bear in Toy Story 3. There's also an owl mariachi band who act as a Greek chorus narrating the journey of Rango.

Rango was produced by Nickelodeon Movies and is the first film fully animated by Industrial Light & Magic with Roger Deakins serving as visual consultant (as he did on Wall-E and How to Train Your Dragon). The animation is impeccable including a gorgeous shot of infinite reflections of the characters inside a giant eyeball. The performances were uniquely captured as well with director Gore Verbinski, working from a script by John Logan (Gladiator, The Last Samurai), using a process he dubbed 'emotion capture.' This is a decidedly low-tech method with the actors performing the scenes on a soundstage. The voices were recorded there and the video tapes were viewed by the animators to properly render movement and facial expressions.

While the majority of animated films tend to look the same, Rango dares to be original. There's no attempt to make the creatures cute and cuddly so the studio can sell them as Happy Meal toys. Even generally adorable animals like rabbits are rendered as mangy oddballs. One character has an arrow going through his eyeball and out the side of his head. Rango himself is hardly the lovable little chameleon from Tangled, his Hawaiian shirt and smashed, lopsided head is meant to evoke the artwork of Ralph Steadman, the long-time collaborator of the late-Hunter S. Thompson.

The subversive humor of Rango is another element that makes the film so successful. The movie is filled with pop culture references which will likely go over the heads of the children in the audience as well as some of the parents accompanying them. Rango makes several references to Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas such as the visual callbacks to Steadman and a cameo from two humans resembling Thompson and Dr. Gonzo. The primary plot point of the movie (involving a water shortage) is lifted straight out of Chinatown while much of the imagery is borrowed from iconic Westerns like High Noon, The Wild Bunch, and A Fistful of Dollars while the score by Hans Zimmer is cribbed from the work of Ennio Morricone. Rango's eventually nemesis, Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy), has a Gatling gun for a tail and a flat-brimmed hat borrowed from Lee Van Cleef. Rango also goes on a vision quest where he meets the Spirit of the West (Timothy Olyphant) and I won't spoil who he's clearly modeled after.

One spectacular action sequence finds the protagonists riding a wagon and being chased by a clan of rodents riding bats ("We can't stop here. This is bat country!"). Somehow the filmmakers weave together references to Apocalypse Now, The Road Warrior, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Star Wars (it is an ILM production). However, none of the references are thrown in simply to show off how clever and hip everyone is. Neither are they Family Guy gags where they pop up randomly and have nothing to do with the plot. The references don't draw attention to themselves so children won't be scratching their heads while those in the know will get an additional layer of joy. The voice acting doesn't draw attention to itself either as the filmmakers chose the best actors, instead of stunt casting A-list talent. This leads to the casting of great character actors like Ray Winstone, Stephen Root, and Harry Dean Stanton.

Rango earned a PG rating and contains some decidedly adult humor. One of the townsfolk mentions how he found a human spinal column in his feces. So parents should be warned in case their child asks them questions about prostate exams.

The year may have barely begun, but Rango is already the frontrunner for Best Animated Film of 2011. With Pixar releasing the anemic looking sequel, Cars 2, it is hard imagine another picture knocking Rango off the pedestal. The fact that a movie so strange and trippy was made in the Hollywood system is astounding. Most likely it exists solely because of Verbinski and Depp's success on the Pirates of the Caribbean series. The story may be familiar, but the film is a unique and witty take on the classic hero's journey.

Rating: ***½ (*****)