The Last Stand

Awww yeahh.

"Retirement Is for Sissies."

Hello again, and strap in for more Tagline action, where the Governator takes it to the streets to stop a small town on the Mexico/US border from being torn up as a drug lord attempts to escape across the border in a souped up race car. That's right, today I'll be talking about The Last Stand, a 2013 action movie starring Arnold Shwarzenegger as a small town sheriff and his deputies trying to keep a super fast corvette driven by a druglord from shooting through town and over the border. I had missed this movie when it was released in theaters earlier this year, but I discovered on Sunday that it's been on Netflix for a while, so I decided to give it a watch, figuring that at the very least I would get to watch some stuff get blown up or a car chase. The movie did not disappoint in either respect. One does have to wonder why Johnny Knoxville was billed over Forest Whitaker on the movie poster, but I guess that's just one of life's great mysteries. What is not mysterious is that clearly to help keep the budget trim there were some deals made with Chevy, because basically every vehicle to appear in this film is a flipping Chevy. WHICH I'M FINE WITH I just wanted to mention that, because y'know like a rock or whatever.

Jackass the Movie 4000.

So Ahnold is convincingly the sheriff of a small town sitting right on the border, his deputies are spanish dude, young go getter who wants to see a bigger world, and Sif, of Asgard (Jaimie Alexander you get it). When they find out that Forest Whitaker's crack team of easily defeated FBI agents have fumbled a high profile prisoner (thanks to a giant electromagnet crane and some guys with machine guns) and that he's planning to use a mobile assault bridge to cross over a canyon into Mexico (they know this because there was a big team of guys also with machine guns, setting up said bridge). With SWAT likely to arrive too late to help (because they aren't driving the manned cruise missile that the druglord is) the sheriff is left to try and figure out how he and about four other people are going to stop a team of professional killers. The answer at least partially involves Johnny Knoxville and his museum of guns (I mean he's not Johnny Knoxville in the movie but... come on you understand, he BASICALLY is just Johnny Knoxville). Among these fine specimens is a Vickers Gun, which if you don't know was a large calibre water-cooled British machine gun introduced in World War I. So that's a thing that you can look forward to in the movie.

Watch out for those zombies shurrif!

So I think these things I've said so far give you a reasonable measure of the sort of movie we are talking about here. There is a fairly thin, simple premise set up, some slight complications, and then it's off to the races with guns, explosions, and more than a couple fistfights. Also a scene involving a grain thresher briefly, but mostly the other things I just listed. There is a moment when a car is blown up with a rocket launcher, and also a spot where an old lady shoots a man. While I may be highlighting here the most ridiculous things, it is still valid because these happen in the movie at all. This is a retro sort of movie in a way. It doesn't try to be especially gritty or real, it's simply an action movie where some good guys fight some bad guys, and every now and then i think it's okay to give yourself that kind of simplicity. You watch complex, morally grey films and tv shows, and they challenge you, which is good! At the same time though, not everything can be Game of Thrones, and frankly I don't think the average person (and certainly not me) would want everything to be that unflinching and brutal.

Sif as a member of S.T.A.R.S.

So instead here we have a film that keeps it pretty simple, and also marks Arnold's first leading role since Terminator 3 (which was about 11 years ago). A thing that I really liked about this movie was that you don't see him trying to act like he is NOT in fact a 66 year old man. He's still clearly a big, strong guy, but he also isn't a young guy, and his character reflects that in a pretty realistic way. I think it's a lot better to own that, and so when he dives through a diner door and the owner asks him how he feels, him saying "old" is funny and genuine, instead of him just acting like he's an ageless action machine. He still fights it out with the bad guy at the end, but he's reaching for it, because his character's been retired for a long time (like Arnold was from action movies while he was a governor say). He's not as young as he once was, but he proves that he's still the same guy who used to kick ass, and I found that charming. Also he beats up a smug asshole so that was pretty cool too.

Ultimately this is a no brainer if you have Netflix and like action movies. This flick is less than two hours long and it doesn't demand much more than sitting back, and watching the good guys put a win in their category. That's it for me today, join me again next week when schedule dictating I will hopefully get to talk about the Lego Movie, which I keep hearing is actually good, despite being a movie about Legos.