High Noon (1952)

"In the end, he must meet his chosen fate all by himself, his town’s doors and windows firmly locked against him. It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day" ~ Fred Zinnemann.

"...The beauty of High Noon is that its themes are universal. On the surface it may be a western, but its themes of conscience, fearlessness and a sense of both what is right and of duty – not just to the law, a cause, or even to others; but to yourself and how you wish to live and be perceived –  transcends the trappings of the genre to connect with audiences who perhaps would never consider themselves as horse opera aficionados. That High Noon has been uprooted from its old west setting time and again to effectively be remade or paid homage to in everything from the 1981 sci-fi actioner Outland to a 2010 episode of the Jimmy McGovern Manchester-set drama The Street starring Bob Hoskins, serves as a testimony to the strength and continuing relevance of the film’s human story of a man who feels compelled to fight rather than flee..."

Read my full review at The Geek Show

RIP Burt Reynolds

I am deeply saddened to hear of the death of Burt Reynolds at the age of 82 

His was a star that had fallen out of favour for some time (1997's Boogie Nights brought him back from being a Hollywood joke and from the wilderness of Vision Express adverts here in the UK and, though it seemed to promise a comeback, this second act failed to materialise and the film remains his last major screen role of renown) but I would be lying if I didn't say that, as a child growing up in the 1980s, Burt Reynolds was my first ever screen hero.

Our family must have watched every film he ever made and I was hooked on his laidback, easygoing screen presence. Here was a very obviously masculine hero but he was one who was just as quick with his wits as he was with his fists, and he always seemed to be never afraid of the opportunity to send himself up or to play for laughs. That kind of hero always appealed to me, indeed it still does.

For a long time now I've said that Reynolds' films deserve a major reappraisal (beyond the evergreen Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run films and the stone cold classic Deliverance many are just seldom seen on UK TV) so it's somewhat bittersweet that it is only with his death that people may start to return to those movies once more.

RIP

The Magnificent Seven (2016)

A stony faced Denzel Washington killing people and shooting shit up is a movie genre in itself.

I'm all for a major Hollywood production acknowledging the fact that the wild west was not as white as the arctic. Figures suggest that a good 25% of cowboys were in fact African American, but I'm confused by the fact that Denzel is the only black face here. Whatever point Antoine Fuqua wants to make is sadly hampered by that fact, but at least his seven are an ethnically diverse bunch; as well as Denzel, there's also a Native American, a Mexican and an East Asian. 

I love the John Sturges original and I love Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, which it was of course a remake of. So what we have here is a remake of a remake, and Fuqua wisely uses his material to be both an affectionate homage to the old fashioned, highly entertaining horse operas of old, as well as a commentary on contemporary times. Unlike Sturges' film, the villain here is not a notorious bandit and his prey are not helpless salt of the earth Mexican peasants; here it is Peter Sarsgaard's land grabbing baron and an archetypal bunch of western homesteaders. This is ruthless corporate theft that ought to chime with post-crash audiences and Sarsgaard is a suitably dark, malevolent presence despite having surprisingly little screen time. There's also a good deal of references to the American Civil War and how its violence is still felt. In the original, Robert Vaughn was merely an infamous bounty hunter whose bottle had gone. Here, Ethan Hawke is an equally notorious former Confederate sniper, traumatised by the horrors he has witnessed. PTSD, corporate greed and cultural diversity? Yes this is a Magnificent Seven for the modern day. 

Fuqua is on favoured ground here, much like his earlier King Arthur, which was rather maligned but which I nonetheless loved. He delivers a rollicking adventure that is handsomely put together, but the seven on display here are not the memorable legends of the 1960 movie that we fondly recall during pub quizzes. Aside from Denzel, a wisecracking-to-the-point-of-obnoxious Chris Pratt and the gun shy Hawke, the rest of the gang are firmly in the Brad Dexter camp. Lee Byung-hun of The Good, The Bad, The Weird fame is a visually striking presence with his knife throwing skills, and likewise Martin Sensmeier's nomad Comanche is equally adept with a bow and arrow, but, given their taciturn demeanours, that's sadly where their respective characterisations end. Manuel García-Rulfo simply fails to make much of an impression beyond a charming smile, whilst Vincent D’Onofrio defies the script to deliver a larger than life eccentric frontiersman I'd like to have seen more of. The real standout in the supporting cast is arguably Haley Bennett's grieving but tough widow who appeals for the seven to help. 

I was initially apprehensive about this, but surprised myself by having quite a fun time with it, largely because it's the kind of film I imagine my western loving late grandfather would have loved too, in that it was just good, clean old fashioned fun with little or no swearing, sex scenes or nudity. However, I'd say it was more a case of The Good Seven, rather than the Magnificent.

Breakheart Pass (1975)

Charles Bronson, the catfish mustachioed tough guy whose career in such similar fare stretches back to the '60s and '50s, could play these kinds of roles in his sleep (indeed, you could argue that he sometimes did!) but his eyecatching, unconventional leading man looks and his natural quiet charisma really shine through here in this multi-faceted role. 

See my full review at The Geek Show

RIP Harry Dean Stanton

David Lynch once asked Harry Dean Stanton how he'd like to be remembered. His response? 

'Doesn't matter'

I'd always hoped that meant that it didn't matter because he planned on living forever, but it was not to be. The news came today that Harry Dean Stanton, the greatest American character actor, has died at the age of 91. So let's raise a glass to him, as he takes himself down that last big, empty highway

RIP

RIP Sam Shepard

Awful day for the entertainment world today, first came the news of Jeanne Moreau's death and now it has been announced that Sam Shepard has died too. The legendary actor and playwright was 73 and had been suffering from ALS.

Hailed as the greatest American playwright of his generation, Shepard uniquely captured the offbeat nature of life on the outskirts of America in a series of blackly comic,poetic productions including Cowboy Mouth (which was a collaboration with his then lover Patti Smith), A Lie of the Mind and Buried Child. He also wrote for cinema too, shadowing Bob Dylan and his entourage for the experimental Renaldo and Clara and co-wrote the stone cold classic that is Paris, Texas for Wim Wenders. 

Acting wise, Shepard made his debut in Terence Malick's Days of Heaven and was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. Other film credits included Steel Magnolias, Baby Boom, All The Pretty Horses, Snow Falling On Cedars, The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, Blackthorn (as an aging and reclusive Butch Cassidy), August: Osage County, Mud and Cold In July.

RIP

RIP Powers Boothe

The actor Powers Boothe has died aged 68.

Texas born Boothe first came to fame in 1980 with his acclaimed performance as infamous cult leader Jim Jones in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, and he went on to star as Raymond Chandler's detective hero in the HBO series Philip Marlowe, as President Noah Daniels in 24, and as the scheming Cy Tolliver in Deadwood (pictured above).

His films included Walter Hill's Southern Comfort, John Milius' Red Dawn, Oliver Stone's Nixon, Tomsbstone, the Sin City films, MacGruber, and most recently The Avengers, which led to a role in the TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D

RIP

High Noon (1952)

The beauty of High Noon is that its themes are universal. On the surface it may be a western, but its themes of conscience, fearlessness and a sense of what is right and of duty, not just to the law, a cause, or even to others, but to yourself and how you wish to live and be perceived, transcends the trappings of the genre to connect with audiences who perhaps would never consider themselves as horse opera aficionados. That High Noon has been uprooted from its old west setting to be effectively been remade or paid homage to time and again in everything from sci-fi actioner Outland (1981) to a 2010 episode of the Jimmy McGovern Manchester-set drama The Street, starring Bob Hoskins, serves as a testimony to the strength and continuing relevance of the film's human story of a man who feels compelled to fight rather than run.

The film's screenwriter Carl Foreman intended High Noon to be an allegory of the McCarthy witch hunts that plagued Hollywood and destroyed the lives and careers of many involved in the business at that time. The House Un-American Activities Committee sought to investigate 'Communist propaganda and influence' in the film industry and declared Foreman, a former Communist Party member who declined to identify any of his colleagues and contemporaries of being fellow members, to be an 'unreliable witness'. He was subsequently blacklisted and moved to the UK. 

However, when you add Fred Zinnemann to the mix as the film director, you get a further resonance to the metaphorical aspect of High Noon and one that supports the theory that the film is a film that just so happens to be set in the west, rather than being a western. As Zinnemann said; "High Noon is not a Western, as far as I'm concerned; it just happens to be set in the Old West". His shooting style certainly supports this too - out goes the traditional landscapes and painterly panoramas of John Ford, in favour of tight close-ups and crisp newsreel style footage in keeping with the social realist approach the director worked in, which reaches its zenith here with the real time setting that makes the tense atmosphere really palpable. 

The critic Stephen Price believes that the Polish-born Zinnemann progressed the anti-McCarthy allegory by allying himself to the core values of Gary Cooper's character, seeing what he represented as being the physical embodiment of his greatest wish for all his films to be about "trying to preserve our civilisation". Price argues that it is easy to see the outlaws arriving to wreak terror and revenge upon the town as a threat to their way of life akin to the fascism of the Nazis who killed Zinnemann's parents in the Holocaust in the previous decade.

Such resonance has run throughout the intervening years and rightly continues to do so to this day, as Zinnemann himself said in his autobiography "In the end, he must meet his chosen fate all by himself, his town's doors and windows firmly locked against him. It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day" This was certainly proved in 1989 when the then 22-year-old Polish graphic designer Tomasz Sarnecki adapted the original Polish language poster for the film by Marian Stachurski as part of the campaign for Solidarity in the first partially free elections in Communist Poland. Referring to his very own High Noon on 4th June, 1989 Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa discussed the metaphor the film presents and its relevance to his politics; "Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual" Call me an idealistic Corbynista (which I am) if you will, but Labour wouldn't go far wrong if they adopted it for their campaign now - like Gary Cooper, Corbyn seems to stand alone, shunned by a soft and self serving, blissfully and blithely ignorant society but compelled to do what is right for them nonetheless, as an encroaching dangerously fascistic menace appears over the horizon.

Rightly regarded as a classic film, not just a classic western, HUAC poster boy John Wayne hated it, calling it "the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life" and went off to make Rio Bravo with Howard Hawks (who also detested High Noon, disparagingly believing that no good Marshall should "run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help", only to be saved by his 'Quaker wife' in the final reel) as a direct result. And if the likes of John Wayne hating High Noon and believing it to be unpatriotic doesn't immediately make High Noon a five star film then I don't know what does.

RIP Bill Paxton

Bill Paxton, who is perhaps most famous for the role of Hudson in Aliens, has died at the age of 61.

Paxton had reportedly been suffering from complications following surgery. The actor starred in big Hollywood blockbusters such as the aforementioned Aliens (pictured above), The Terminator, Predator 2, Titanic, True Lies, Twister, Apollo 13, Tombstone, and Nightcrawler, as well as the live action version of Thunderbirds. On television, he won the Emmy for his role in Hatfield and McCoys, and three Golden Globe nods for the HBO drama Big Love.

RIP

Mystery Road (2013)

"How do you sleep at night - locking up your own people all the time?"

Despite Australia enjoying a healthy film industry, there doesn't seem to be enough films made (or being successfully-distributed overseas at least) by or for the indigenous Australian people - a people who feel that their rights to citizenship, to be recognised in the population census and to be given the vote did not occur until 1967 and whose affairs, in several states, were until then handled under departments with remits for flora and fauna (and thus, it is argued, equating them to vegetables or plants of the land rather than people) - so it's encouraging to find a film like Mystery Road from indigenous filmmaker Ivan Sen that attempts to change that, and even more encouraging to hear that a sequel - Goldstone - was made this year. 

Set in outback Queensland with locations boasting such richly atmospheric names as the eponymous Mystery Road, Massacre Creek, Slaughter Hill and the Dusk Til Dawn Motel, this measured modern-day Western is actually little more than a shaggy dog story of a thriller centering around the violent death of a young indigenous girl and a mystery involving wild dogs roaming the dusty, barren landscape. Writer/director Sen's real interest lay in the evocative depiction of society through the springboard that is afforded by the central crime, and its a society that is as desiccated and in need of attention and repair as the rusted abandoned jalopies and the failing fences that line the scorched long stretches of roads.

Aaron Pedersen stars as detective Jay Swan, 'an Abbo copper' caught between two worlds and viewed with suspicion by everyone, from his colleagues on the force to his own, estranged family. With a seemingly unmoved police department, it falls to Swan to investigate the murder of a teenage aboriginal girl, discovered by the roadside, and his investigations led him close to home when he finds a link between the dead girl and his teenage daughter, Crystal. Delving further, this lone wolf soon uncovers a web of drug-dealing and exploitation that has ensnared almost everyone in the community, maybe even his colleagues such as Hugo Weaving's subtly menacing and enigmatic Johnno. Weaving is perhaps the film's biggest name, but the real star here is Pederson whose natural quiet charisma lights up the screen, making it almost impossible to take your eyes off him, his permanently knitted brow and thousand yard stare - and rightly so. I am so glad to see his character get his own series as he certainly has what it takes to carry it.

It's a beautifully shot film, imbued with the tropes of Westerns such as stetsons and Winchester rifles against such remarkable desert scenery, along with some impressive aerial photography that capture the isolation and barely civilised nature of the arid outback. The finale may explode into unexpected (and I suspect somewhat tongue-in-cheek) gunplay but its the long and winding paths it took to get to this denouement that count and are what you'll remember for long after.

Solidarity in the Labour Party

It was High Noon for Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday, but he needn't have been afraid. Jezza triumphed for the second time in a year, increasing his mandate with a bigger margin than that of 2015 and proving, hopefully once and for all, that he is the right man for the job.

But wait, predictably the likes of Hilary Benn and Angela Eagle were out in force yesterday claiming that they must stand together, and 'stay and fight' for what they believe in in the party, with Eagle announcing that she believed people were trying to force them out.

It's funny isn't it how the Blairites (I'm aware that Labour now view that term as abusive - seriously, I'm not making that up - so let me be clear, I'm using it in its traditional meaning; ie those MP's of the New Labour ideal, but was there ever another meaning? No. So get over yourselves and stop trying to claim you're being bullied when people use a term to sum up your ideals and position - you keep calling us trots, after all) saw nothing wrong with pushing out anyone who believed that socialism wasn't a dirty word back in the mid '90s, yet claim they are being victimised now when finding it is them who are currently out of step.

I don't know about you but I'm getting a little sick and tired of this battle from within for the spirit of Labour. I am sick of seeing Blairites take to social media to claim that anyone pro-Corbyn isn't really Labour at heart, and I am sick of this not just because its the kind of sneering snobbish bullying they claim Momentum and the Corbynistas do, but because it is primarily just a stupid notion. Pardon me, but I actually think any member who wishes to reinstate Clause 4 is a damn sight more Labour than anyone who saw no problem with removing it twenty years ago.

So here's the thing; we're all paid up Labour members. We don't agree on everything, but then do we really expect complete universal agreement? We should unite behind the things we are in complete accord over, which should be to oust the Tories from government and to end the austerity measures that is crippling this country. So it's actually really very simple, if you agree with the Tory austerity policies, and if you voted for them, then you are I am sorry to say not a Labour supporter and there ought to be no place for you in the party. There, I've said it. That's the only true way to measure it. The rest of us should band together and stop this detrimental internal snobbery and bickering. Now.

RIP David Huddleston

He was The Big Lebowski, he was Grandpa Arnold in The Wonder Years, he was the star of dozens of Westerns, including Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles and he was - to kids of my generation - Santa Claus. But now David Huddleston has died at the age of 85 from heart and kidney disease. 

RIP

RIP Noel Neill

Noel Neill, the original Lois Lane, has passed away aged 95.

Neill played the Daily Planet reporter in the 1948 and 1950 movie serials alongside Kirk Alyn as Superman, and returned to the role in 1953 for the TV series The Adventures of Superman, starring George Reeves, which ended five years later in 1958. Her connection to the adventures of Krypton's finest continued with an appearance as Lois Lane's mother Ella in the 1978 Superman movie starring Christopher Reeve, a role in the 1992 series Superboy, and the 2006 film Superman Returns starring Brandon Routh.

She made almost 100 films in her career, including several westerns, and appeared alongside the likes of Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly. 

RIP 

RIP Michael Cimino

It's not been the greatest starts to July has it? News of yet another tragic death now, as director Michael Cimino's body was found yesterday at his LA home after friends alerted the police to the concerns they had for 77 years old not contacting them. No cause of death has been given as yet.

The director may have only helmed eight films in his career, but what a career it was.

His first film was 1974's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, a buddy buddy vehicle for Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges that marked him out as a unique talent, but it was the 1978 film The Deer Hunter, starring Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken, that cemented this reputation. The Vietnam drama is considered a landmark of '70s Hollywood, bagging five Oscars including the award for Best Film in 1979. 

His follow up however, Heaven's Gate, tells a different tale; a financial disaster that went four times over budget and a year behind schedule, this account of the 1889-'93 Wyoming Johnson County War starring Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken almost bankrupted United Artists, brought to an end the notion of director-driver, free rein filmmaking, and was critically and commercially lambasted upon its release. Opinions are still decidedly mixed regarding this film, but many - including myself - hail it as something of a masterpiece.

He would later go to direct Year of the Dragon (1985) The Sicilian (1987) and a remake of the 1955 Humphrey Bogart noir The Desperate Hours in 1990 with Mickey Rourke and Antony Hopkins. His last film was 1996's Sunchaser starring Woody Harrelson and future Chicago PD star Jon Seda.

RIP

Where The Buffalo Roam (1966)

Not as good as I recall from when I last saw it around 10 years ago, but even a sub-par Dennis Potter is better than some playwrights firing on all cylinders.

'Before its time' is a good adage or (backhanded) compliment for the 1966 Wednesday Play, Where The Buffalo Roam. It's a wildly inventive and bold piece - a sort of Billy Liar that turns horrifically sour - but you are constantly aware of Potter's vision butting up awkwardly against the constraints of television production of that day. I'm not normally one to advocate remakes, but this is definitely an example of something that would benefit a retelling now that technology, and a surer grasp of telefantasy, has caught up with what Potter originally intended.

The play concerns a problematic young Welsh man called Willy Turner, played by Hywel Bennett.  Considered 'educationally subnormal', he is an illiterate, unemployed labourer on probation for knocking another youth's front teeth in, who lives at home in a drab Swansea terrace with his mother and grandfather - his father having died years earlier. He escapes the daily grind with a series of obsessive fantasies that see him as a lone, enigmatic and black clad gunslinger riding the high plains of the old Wild West. 

These fantasies are depicted with fast intercutting that remove Willy and other characters from the everyday to saloons and vistas of the West, but often come up short - especially when its clear that Glyn Houston's probation officer is hiding his cowboy attire beneath the present day overcoat in scenes with Willy's long suffering mother played by Megs Jenkins, his disabled (an injury from WWI) and grumpy grandfather played by Aubrey Richards and his teacher (Richard Davies, famous for Please Sir!) at the rehabilitation centre who is trying to teach Willy to read and write.

Hywel Bennett was a very interesting actor in the 1970s; a beautiful young man he avoided the traditional leading young man roles and, in the main, opted for much darker material to contrast his doe eyed handsome dreamy appearance. Most famously, he portrayed a murderous psychopath opposite Hayley Mills in Twisted Nerve and would reunited with Mills once again to play a duplicitous lover out for her money in the film adaptation of Agatha Christie's Endless Night. Where The Buffalo Roam also sees him mining these darker depths as it is revealed that Willy's fantasy life has always been an escape for him ever since his late father used to beat him for his inability to read. These fantasies become increasingly frequent and coincide with some violent mood swings which ultimately sees his toy gun change to a real one (inexplicably - a real 'sod you, I can do what I want' moment from Potter that may alienate and frustrate viewers) and proceeds to take the life of his mother and grandfather, as well as the old man's pigeons. Now on the run, Willy is approached by a local bobby outside a TV store (he's entranced by the cowboy film on the sets in the window display) and promptly shots the constable dead. Cornered on the roof of a warehouse, he returns to reality but it is too late - he is swiftly picked off by police marksmen and falls to his death in the reservoir below, his body being fished out on a stretcher in an almost symbolic crucified/hung from the gallows manner over the final credits.

It's easy to see the real Potter behind the script for Where The Buffalo Roam; the writer freely admitted to using fantasy as an escape from reality, firstly as a youth at school (and, like Stand Up Nigel Barton, this is one of the first examples of Potter using his school life for drama - with flashbacks to Willy being humiliated in class by the teacher and his fellow pupils) and latterly as the debilitating illness took hold, as it was now doing at this stage in his life. 

Where The Buffalo Roam is available to view on YouTube and is for sale on several bootleg sites, but remains unreleased officially. To get the BBC to consider repeating some of these classic plays, please sign the petition I started here

The Homesman (2014)

A bit of a belated blog post/review for The Homesman, a film I watched last month. Having watched it, I now want to see Tommy Lee Jones in one of these T-Shirts

The Homesman is an adaptation of a novel by Glendon Swarthout, directed by, co-written by and starring Tommy Lee Jones himself. It is a revisionist western, and hailed by some as a feminist western - hence my desire to see Jones clad in that attire. But whilst its heart is certainly in the right place in both respects it does occasionally slip away from those earnest and admirable feminist intentions. 

When three women are decreed to have lost their mind as a result of sever trauma in the desolate Nebraska territory of 1850s, it falls to Hilary Swank's plain and capable spinster Mary Bee Cuddy to escort them to back East to civilised and secure Iowa. Whilst Cuddy has flinty determination and spirit by the bucketload she is acutely aware that she needs an experienced man to aid her in the journey so, when she encounters a grizzled wretch by the name of George Briggs (Jones), she duly enlists him in her task.

There are two types of western; the traditional and the revisionist and my heart belongs primarily to the latter. As a result I lapped up the bleak, strange tale Jones offers up, marvelling at its equally harrowing and amusing parts. Beautifully sombrely shot by Rodrigo Prieto, this is a chilly look at the old west which doesn't seek to paint a pretty picture, preferring instead to focus on the very real hardships and dangers faced for the frontiers people of the 19th-century.

But Jones isn't averse to paying a debt to the more traditional trappings of the western genre either and, in its central opposites attract partnership of his roguish but essentially decent Briggs and Swank's brilliantly portrayed Cuddy, he has a dynamic that harks back to the classics like The African Queen, True Grit and Rooster Cogburn. It's just a shame that the tale's shocking and surprising turn has to occur because, from that moment on, the previously strong mould breaking intentions fall away. The spirit remains but its a startling omission which makes the film lose out in the long run for me personally. 

Nevertheless, as Jones proved with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, he is an interesting and strong filmmaker not too different from that other great western star who took his place both in front of and behind the camera; Clint Eastwood. He gets the best out of his accomplished cast which includes Meryl Streep's daughter and former star of The Newsroom Grace Gummer in a key role as one of the 'madwomen' and Streep herself in a small cameo near the end. Look out too for the Coen brother's True Grit star Hailee Steinfeld in all too brief role. Like that suitably grubby, authentic remake, The Homesman is one of the best of the modern westerns.

The Last Stand (2013)

Following the success of The Expendables franchise, it was clearly only a matter of time before the old guard of '80s action movies returned to star in a clutch of new movies, older but not necessarily wiser.

Hot on the heels of the 2012 Walter Hill movie Bullet to the Head which saw Stallone back at the fore, came 2013's The Last Stand. 

Directed by South Korea's Kim Jee-Woon, director of The Good, The Bad and The Weird making his English language debut here, this pulpy action packed modern day western saw the return of the former Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Unlike some of those other musclebound cinematic heroes of my childhood, Arnie always seemed to be an unusually subversive figure in the popcorn action drama genre. It was as if the film makers intrinsically knew the guy was just too big, too dumb and too conspicuously a film star to even attempt any realism. Thankfully, Jee-Woon follows this deeply tongue in cheek, just go with it, approach right from the off; just look at the name of Arnie's character, Ray Owens, a name  which shows nothing of the actor's Austrian roots and everything about the film's first choice Liam Neeson, but this being an immensely silly film it refuses to change the character to incorporate Arnie, offering up no explanation whatsoever! Jee-Woon scores especially highly with this style during  the film's final stages which culminate in a huge gunfight in the titular last stand; a sleepy hick town in Arizona that Arnie's Sheriff presides over, which is in turn both excitingly tense, bloody and utterly hilarious.

The plot riffs off the old classic westerns like High Noon and Rio Bravo. It seems set to be another sleepy weekend in Summerton, Arizona but when Eduardo Noriega's drug-cartel kingpin escapes from FBI custody to head for the Mexican border via Summerton, the only people who can stop him are Arnie and his ragtag team of officers, Luis Guzmán, Zach Gilford and Jaimie Alexander - because clearly even a one horse town requires a hottie in a uniform - and whoever else he can deputise into action including washed up former Marine Rodrigo Santoro and local wacko and weapons enthusiast Johnny Knoxville. 

But the film can't stay on the straight path and Jee-Woon and scriptwriter Andrew Knauer throw a host of ridiculous additions to the plot, not least of all the small fact that when Noriega isn't running an international drug syndicate he's actually a part time racing car driver, which means his getaway is supplied by a modified Chevrolet Corvette C6 ZR1. As you do. 

Also lending themselves to the proceedings are Forest Whitaker as the federal agent hot on Noriega's trail and who underestimates Arnie's ''piss-ant country sheriff'', and Peter Stormare as Noriega's inside man on the ground in Summerton. I used to actually like Stormare when he first started out, but I've grown extremely tired of his cheesy pantomime villainy being wheeled out year in year out for this kind of hokum and I don't know what the fuck he thought he was doing with that accent. There's also a very small cameo from the legend that is Harry Dean Stanton, but it's totally undeserving of his presence and rather distasteful.

As with all great comic book fun, The Last Stand is at its best when revelling in the action or the inherent silliness (look out for a homicidal granny and the couldn't care less cafe dwellers who barely raise an eyebrow at the carnage going off around them) but suffers badly when the script solely requires dialogue and plot exposition, a focus on its thinly sketched characters and on the forced romance between Alexander and Santoro. But, leave your brain at the door, and you'll enjoy.