to steam right now on Amazon 5 A decade on, Arnie’s one more The Last Stand

After a decade ago e Last Stand is right to the top of the Net ix popularity charts. In mid-April of 2023, the Kim Jee-woon action movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Johnny Knoxville was Net ix’s No. 1 movie. Ten years on, this is a minor work of justice, as e Last Stand was actually a pretty good movie.

It was bright, upbeat, enjoyably violent, and boasted a fun cast of notable supporting players, including the inimitable Luis Guzmán, Jaime Alexander, and Rodrigo Santoro. Forest Whitaker played an FBI agent. e lm was a modest critical success (it boasts a 61% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes), but only made $43 million at the worldwide box o ce. It passed from the public consciousness pretty quickly after that. e Last Stand”was meant to be something of a comeback for Schwarzenegger. at said, Schwarzenegger turned to politics and was the governor of California from 2003 until 2011. When he did return to acting, it was in the gimmicky “Expendables” movies, which only existed to get 1980s action heroes on the screen together. e plotting and action were lacklustre. e Last Stand, then, was Schwarzenegger declaring a new act in his lm career. He acknowledged that he was older, and appeared in this new lm as a smalltown sheri who was openly past his prime. After being thrown through a window, someone asks Schwarzenegger’s character how he feels. “Old,” he replies. e premise of e Last

Stand is B-movie gold. A dangerous criminal named Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) has slipped out of FBI custody in Las Vegas and goes on the run to the Mexican border in a fast, sexy sports car. In order to get to Mexico, however, he will have to pass through a small Arizona town called Somteron, a real city on Highway 95. Somerton, in the movie, is overseen by Sheri Ray Owens (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a disgraced LA cop who was transferred to the boonies as penance for a bungled operation back in the city. Altered by the FBI, Sheri Owens will have to assemble a makeshift blockade in Somerton and stop Noriega from getting through. e bulk of “ e Last Stand” is devoted to how Owens secures the town and arms his deputies (Luis Guzmán, e lm’s climax will indeed be a last stand between Somerton, and Cortez’s goons.

Jaime Alexander, and Rodrigo Santoro). anks to an eccentric local weapons collector named Lewis (Johnny Knoxville), they have access to ancient WWII weapons and non-police-issue machine guns.

Director Kim Jee-woon ( e Good, e Bad, e Weird, and I Saw e Devil), making his rst Englishlanguage feature, seems to have remembered that he was making a down-toearth B-Western, keeping the pace brisk, the action exciting, and the characters fun. It might be the lightest lm in the director’s oeuvre, a résumé otherwise replete with moody noir and dank horror movies. De nitely worth the watch.