#659: Last Man Standing
From pulp detective fiction to jidai-geki and back again
Initial release: September 20, 1996
Director: Walter Hill
Say you’ve got a shitty little town in the middle of nowhere. It’s been taken over by two rival factions, which are currently in an uneasy truce as neither has overwhelming power over the other. Most everyone else is dead or fled, and the folks that remain tend to be either stubborn, craven or just greedy. So far, everything looks like the stalemate will persist for some time… at least until the new guy shows up and, seeing what’s going on, decides to upend the status quo, eliminate both gangs, and maybe make a little money for himself. Congratulations, you’ve got a Yojimbo plot. Or maybe it’s the storyline from A Fistful of Dollars. Could be it’s the story of Django. Oh, oh, wait, it’s the plot from Miller’s Crossing! But in actuality, it was Dashiel Hammett’s novel Red Harvest. And now it’s Last Man Standing.
Walter Hill is a film industry veteran who’s had his hand in projects as diverse as the Alien films and The Warriors, in addition to likely creating the buddy cop genre. He is also a frequent director of neo-noirs and westerns. Last Man Standing is an interesting combination of both. It’s got a lot of elements from each genre: gravelly-voiced narration, pouring rain and the high desert setting, mobsters and Mexicans, and a healthy dose of violence with a quick-draw hero who unloads his 1911s into goons like it’s a shooting gallery.
The plot is pretty simple. “John Smith” is on the run from something back east — maybe it’s the feds, maybe it’s some syndicate, maybe he’s just stepping out on his old life. He stops for gas in Jericho, a shitty little town 50 miles from the Mexican border, only for Irish gangsters — here in town buying Mexican booze to send up to the rest of the country — to smash up his car for fun. Needing a few days to get his car fixed, he decides to make his presence known in town by ventilating the man most responsible for the damage. It impresses the rival Italian mobsters who have set up shop across town enough to hire him, but he’s not here to pick sides, but to play them off of each other. If you’ve seen Yojimbo or really any of the other movies I mentioned, you know how this works.
Walter Hill’s direction is what makes the film work, I think. Noirs and westerns have always had a lot in common, and Walter exploits that overlap to good effect here. Most scenes feel like they borrow from the more ambitious techniques of the 1940s, though when the shooting starts Hill lifts straight from the likes of Die Hard and Hong Kong blood operas, Smith doing a lot of dodging and shooting from where he lands, which of course makes me think of Max Payne.
Last Man Standing has a lot of neo-noir to it, with the mobsters and the occasional surprise downpour, but it really works more as a western. Despite Smith’s pulp detective novel trappings — he’s a man stepping into shoes once occupied by Dashiel Hammett’s nameless Continental Op — he really has a lot more in common with the cowboy drifter archetype, a hard-bitten figure with no past that the Man with No Name would likely appreciate. Bruce Willis as an actor is, or I suppose was, mostly capable of playing one particular type of Guy — masculine, not exactly handsome but not bad looking, not great with women but not the worst, and generally kind of snarky while possessed of an incredible capacity for violence. And sure, there’s jokes in that, but personally I appreciate an actor who knows what he’s about and what he’s capable of. Smith is the platonic ideal of the Bruce Willis Guy. He’s got it all — his narration is slangy and sardonic, he’s extremely handy with a gun, he cuts an imposing figure with his broad shoulders and squinting bulldog expression.
Opposite Willis is a fantastically unhinged Christopher Walken as an Irish mob enforcer, as well as a varied cast of mostly B-listers, including returning Walter Hill collaborator David Patrick Kelly and long-time character actor William Sanderson (perhaps the archetypal “hey it’s that guy!” guy. Or maybe I’ve just seen Blade Runner too many times.)
I really liked Last Man Standing. Some might argue that it’s the weakest Yojimbo knockoff, and maybe that’s true (personally I think there are worse) but it’s still a solid film that achieves what it sets out to do. Hill is happy to let his actors — especially Walken — chew the scenery when they’re not setting fire to it or putting it full of holes, and between that and some inspired cinematography it makes for a fun ride.
-june❤
