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: *** (*****)

I Saw the Devil

I Saw the Devil - Dir. Kim Ji-woon (2010)

South Korea is the place to go for the true connoisseur of cinema seeking new and exciting films. Some of the best pictures of the past decade have come from South Korea, such as the war epic Tae Guk Gi, the off-beat rom-com My Sassy Girl, and the horror comedy The Host. There's one genre the South Korean filmmakers have lately been able to pull off better than anybody and that is the hard-assed, ultraviolent revenge movie. One need not look any further for prime examples than movies like The Chaser or Park Chan-wook's brilliant Vengeance Trilogy comprised of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance. I Saw the Devil isn't quite as successful as its predecessors, but it does provide a gut-wrenching experience on a purely visceral level.

I Saw the Devil is an all-star collaboration with Kim Ji-woon in the director's seat. Kim first received international press during the Asian horror boom with A Tale of Two Sisters (which was remade by Dreamworks as The Uninvited), then followed it up with the gangster flick A Bittersweet Life and the wild Western homage The Good, the Bad, the Weird. His newest picture features Oldboy star Choi Min-sik and screen idol, Lee Byung-hun, who is probably more familiar to Western audiences as Storm Shadow in G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra.

Choi is Kyung-chul, a merciless serial killer targeting young women. He bludgeons them then takes his victims to his hideout where he decapitates and dismembers them with a makeshift guillotine. Kyung-chul's latest victim is Joo-yun (Oh San-ha), the daughter of a local police chief and the fiancée to Lee's Soo-hyun, an agent for the National Intelligence Service (South Korea's CIA). Both men are horrified when Joo-yun's body parts are found scattered across a riverbank. Thanks to the father, Soo-hyun gathers a list of suspects and quickly zeroes in on Kyung-chul just as he is about to claim murder an abducted schoolgirl. This leads into the hook of I Saw the Devil.

Soo-hyun beats Kyung-chul into unconsciousness, but does not kill him. That would be too easy. Instead, he plants a tracking device inside Kyung-chul and releases him into the wild. Soo-hyun's plan for revenge is to punish Kyung-chul, let him go, follow, then punish him again before he can quench his murderous lusts. Rinse, lather, repeat. Predictably, Soo-hyun's hare-brained scheme of extreme cockblocking goes terribly wrong, placing his surviving loved ones in grave danger.

I Saw the Devil just barely misses the mark in qualifying for torture porn. Those of you with a weak stomach may be thankful that the grisliest stuff occurs off-screen or hidden in the shadows. Somehow this makes the attacks even creepier, including one (seen in silhouettes) in which Kyung-chul repeatedly smashes a wrench into a woman's skull. The squeamish should still be ready to cover their eyes at any moment, especially during a close-up where Soo-hyun uses a scalpel to sever his nemesis's Achilles tendon. It should be noted that the film went through extensive editing to remove violent content in order to receive a theatrical release in South Korea.

The story isn't an easy one to engage with and not just because the queasy violence. The film forces the audience to identify with two rather loathsome characters. If you're looking for someone to root for, forget about it. However, I Saw the Devil never asks you to, it simply drags you along for this twisted cat and mouse game. Any sympathy for Soo-hyun quickly turns to revulsion when you discover rescuing Kyung-chul's intended victims is completely incidental to the primary objective of tormenting the killer. When Kyung-chul traps a nurse, he forces her to strip and perform fellatio on him. Only then does Soo-hyun make his move. He could have easily prevented this happening at all. It isn't so much about saving lives as prevent Kyung-chul from taking them.

Therein lays the film's greatest weakness, an unshakable and unsettling misogynistic bent. Female characters exist solely to be slain or saved. They are terrified, frail, and naïve. This isn't a diverse collection of women either; they are all young and beautiful.

At nearly two and a half hours long, I Saw the Devil is about thirty to forty minutes too long. There's also a bizarre left turn into Texas Chainsaw Massacre territory in the middle of the picture when Kyung-chul meets two friends who not only happen to be serial killers too, but cannibals as well. The script by Park Hoon-jung attempts to convey the futility of revenge and the ways in which it eats away at the soul. Soo-hyun has stared into the abyss, the abyss has stared back, and he relishes it. But, the themes were already richly explored in Park's films. Here, it feels like empty and ponderous moralizing.

Despite the excessive runtime and rough treatment of women, the film has a remarkable visual style thanks to Kim Ji-woon. The dark mood manages to make Seven look like a Saturday morning cartoon show. Kim knows how to construct fantastic action sequences. The movie opens with a chilling scene of Joo-yun being assaulted on a snow covered road, but the centerpiece irrefutably is a scene where Kyung-chul stabbing two men to death as they ride in a taxi. Blood sprays everywhere like an overworked sprinkler system as the camera circles around and around in one take. Kim should definitely be considered one of the country's top directors alongside Park and Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host, and Mother).

I Saw the Devil is a nasty piece of work. The visuals are exceptionally stylish. If David Fincher did Hong Kong action, it might look something like I Saw the Devil. The acting is strong with Choi Min-sik portraying the wild-eyed mania that made him famous. His sheer animalism is contradicted by Lee Byung-hun's handsome and stoic visage. The contradictions are also apparent in a plot which alternates between enthralling and repugnant.

Rating: **