The Last Stand

+The Last Stand -- director +Jee-woon Kim

His term as Governator over, Little Arnie +Schwarzenegger has resumed his starring film career with an actioneer that’s -- blatently political. It’s a sneaky commercial for the National Rifle Association.

Looking a bit gray and lined, Arnie plays a sheriff who quit the LA drug squad for the leisurely life of a small-town Nevada sheriff. The comfort ends when a big time Mexico drug boss escapes captivity and deploys an army of killers, high tech weapons and a superfast car to tear thru Arnie’s town to Mexico. Arnie won’t let him. 

All the good sheriff has is three deputies (two inexperienced and one a comical Mexican), a jailed drunken vet, and a gun nut who passes off his personal armory as a museum (open three hours a week). The film is a pale echo of Howard Hawks’s classic redemption tale, Rio Bravo, where the strong sheriff was similarly dependent on an odd lot of civilians.  

Arnie’s script plays on his age, his retreat from action, his spending his ostensible day off in slippers. He dramatically disproves the FBI agent’s (Forest Whittaker) assumption of a simple small town sheriff. 

Peer past the relentless action and the film’s politics is obvious. For this society to survive, the FBI and local lawmen aren’t enough. As the bad guys mount an expensive, highly organized, military-style attack, civilization depends on a heavily-armed personal militia. Hence the gun-nut who illegally keeps major artillery that he now can mobilize, with the sheriff’s approval as well as need. In another example of an unrestrained armed citizenry, a granny pulls a shotgun out from her lavender and chachkes to whack a threat to the sheriff.

This fantasy of macho gunfire has two problems. It’s a bubble world with no sense of connection to the real world. First, the sheriff is a loner, no wife, no kids, just the townsfolk, so he has no personal character beneath the cliches the script inflicts on him (e.g., “You can’t buy my honour”). He’s not much more human than his fast-action rifle. 

Second, there are no kids in this town. Not a single young extra. So the explosion of guns and deaths plays out without any injury to the innocent. Even the grown-ups who stay at their breakfast instead of seeking safety don’t suffer. The film pretends that only gunfighters suffer in gunfights. That’s the NRA myth.

Of course recent history has taught us otherwise. Though we don’t see any kids, the climax involves the heroes’ use of a schoolbus. Given all the recent school shootings, this plot device reveals a jaw-dropping insensitivity.

As it happens the film has bombed. I’d like to think that’s because the public has awakened to the real danger of personal militias and uncontrolled weaponry. I fear it’s rather because Arnie has overstayed his welcome in the public eye.