Review of Last Man Standing (1995) by Justin L — 01 Jul 2012

Solid action film from veteran writer/director Walter Hill. However, despite the film's many strengths, the stridently laconic tone of the film, which I think was intended to evoke a tout quit cool attitude, makes it so that the characters and story are completely unengaging and uninteresting.

David Patrick Kelly, Bruce Dern and William Sanderson are the only characters that seem to wake up the film. The action scene are terrific though and the film does certainly come to life during these scenes, but you can't help but wonder how much better they would have been if it was like Hill's "Deadwood" series where there were characters and story lines you cared about.

There is a stellar cast with Bruce Willis, William Sanderson, Christopher Walken, Michael Imperioli, R.D. Call, Leslie Mann and Hill alumni David Patrick Kelly and Bruce Dern. There is also great production and costume design, along with dusty moody photography by LLoyd Ahern.

It's also a fun mash-up of gangster and western films, with the gangster story about waring bootlegger gangs, but the western setting and other genre elements dominate the film. The story is from the Akira Kurosawa samurai classic "Yojinbo", which owed much to American westerns and was later remade by Sergio Leone into the western classic "A Fistful of Dollars" (not to mention the many lesser rip off's like Rutger Hauer's sic-fi version "Omega Doom"), so it's a treat for film nerds to see this story re-imagined by respected genre writer/director Hill.

"Last Man Standing" is definitely worth watching for fans of Hill, Leone, Kurosawa, Willis, action, westerns or gangster films, and although it is certainly a solid action flick, I can't help but feel disappointed because it really had the potential to be a classic.