Public office is infamous for turning even the most charming of figures into decrepit husks — even President Obama hasn’t been able to avoid this anti-fountain of youth. But for Schwarzenegger it’s been especially damning because of how important his physique was to all of his characters. While he may still be more menacing than your grandfather, watching Schwarzenegger un-ironically don the badass lone-wolf persona this late in the game can only compare unfavorably to his past roles.
The anticipation for Schwarzenegger’s first big action vehicle has been surprisingly high among the viewing public, but there is a reason why you’re reading about it now and not in the summer, when all the real action heroes come out to play. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of guns, fast cars and explosions to keep you from falling asleep (due solely to loudness), but it’s all so numbed in cliches that it’s impossible to watch. Even past his prime, Schwarzenegger looked like a monster that could rip your head off and play football with it. While he’d still look out of place in a nursing home, Arnold is as unfit for this leading role as Clint Eastwood was onstage at the Republican National Convention.
In “The Last Stand,” Schwarzenegger’s Sheriff Ray Owens is a tough Los Angeles police officer before a mission gone wrong cripples his partner and his self-esteem. Resigning himself to a sleepy town right on the edge of the US-Mexico border (clearly your first choice of residence when you want to get away from all that messy drug violence), he and the townspeople get more than they bargained for when a recently escaped cartel leader makes a getaway for the drug safe haven known as Mexico. A good action movie should have an unpredictably evil villain to fight against its ever-persevering hero. “The Last Stand” has what you don’t want: a villain who spends the entire movie talking to himself about how amazing he is, and a hero who can do no wrong, even when he’s over 60 and still fighting after he’s been awake for over 24 hours without so much as a nap.
Director Kim Ji-woon made a name for himself in his native South Korea through a mix of bizarrely entertaining films (like “The Good, The Bad, and the Weird”) and exceptionally poignant ones (“I Saw the Devil”). It’s a shame then that “The Last Stand” is neither of those things. Maybe it’s because it is his first American film, but it all feels despondently ordinary. Even Schwarzenegger’s bulky presence can’t fill the hole in this movie, leaving something as emotionally rich as the death of a young deputy as hollow as the chamber of an unloaded gun.
Although the movie is crammed with great character actors to fill out its supporting roles, even they can’t make much out of the material. Luis Guzman (“Boogie Nights,” “Community”), Forest Whitaker (“The Last King of Scotland”) and Peter Stormare (“The Big Lebowski”) all suffer under the weight of their less-than-interesting characters. If Guzman weren’t always paired with an overacting Johnny Knoxville, he would be the movie’s standout star. Then there’s poor Whitaker, stuck as a mundane FBI agent who predictably loses track of the one person he’s supposed to keep his one good eye on. At least Stormare hams it up with a hilarious Southern accent, but when he exclaims, “This is getting boring. Get the big guns!” he explains all the things that make this movie so unremarkable.
There’s a lot of talk in the news nowadays about the culture of violence in America that allows for so much blood to be shed on screen, and while there could be an entire book written on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s role in the action genre, “The Last Stand” can’t stand up to anything Schwarzenegger has ever made (even “Terminator 3”). It’s hard to pin it all on any one misfire; it’s not that the acting is terrible or the direction sloppy, although the script can take the bulk of the blame, since it brings nothing to the table other than a means for Schwarzenegger to remind you that he’s serious about this whole “movie star” thing again.