The Last Stand

Synopsis: Sheriff Ray Owens (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is looking forward to a quiet weekend. Most of the small down-Mexico-way town has left to follow the high school football team to their big game, and it’s his day off. But then drug cartel boss Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) escapes from FBI custody and is speeding towards the border…

Ok, so Ahnuld has been away for a while, busy running California. Now that he seems to have got politics out of his system he’s back doing what he’s best known for: blowing people up and shooting them in the head. And truthfully, it’s not a bad return to that kind of gleefully stupid violence. But while it’s gleeful, it is also very, very stupid.

To get to the big action set-pieces that are the only reason you’d be paying cinema prices to see this, you’ll need to sit through a fair bit of scene-setting that isn’t awful, but isn’t great either. There’s nothing wasted, every piece of information you get fed is relevant to the grand denouement, but it’s all obvious and laboured. There’s the guy locked up in the Sheriff’s office for petty theft. He’s also the ex-boyfriend of one of the deputies and they casually drop in that he’s served in Iraq, or Afghanistan, so you know that he’s a badass with a gun. That’ll come in handy later on. There’s also the village idiot (for want of a better description), who runs a military museum as a legal dodge for his enormous firearms collection. These scenes exist for no other reason than to justify why a small town sheriff can suddenly unleash holy hell on a bunch of mercenaries trying to help a cocky drug lord escape the country. In short, it’ll make you fidget in your seat.

Fortunately, that passes and they get to the shooting. And it’s here that you’ll get what you paid for. A near empty town turned into a guerilla deathtrap by a couple of cops and deputized civilians. There’s plenty of set-piece moments and lots of running and gunning. Unfortunately the poor green screen work of the final fight does sour the experience a little. It’s a bit puzzling that they appear to have to run out of funds for Schwarzenegger’s big return, but then again it’s been a long time and perhaps he’s not that bankable anymore.

The Last Stand isn’t anything more than what you’d expect it to be, a bit of diversionary entertainment to keep you in a cool cinema while we’re in the middle of a heatwave. Everyone involved is really just doing it for a laugh, especially Forrest Whittaker, who seems to be riffing off the cartoon parody of himself from Seth McFarlane’s animated series American Dad.

It’s fun but unexceptional stuff.

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