Last Man Standing

From Lloyd Ahern's breathtaking, earth-toned cinematography to Freeman Davies' uncommonly graceful editing, Last Man Standing is a real class act, an old-fashioned thriller propelled by wildly violent, decidedly modern action sequences. Read full review

Writer-director Walter Hill, known earlier in his career for his American versions of French thrillers by Jean-Pierre Melville (indebted in turn to Hollywood noir), specializes in tweaking much-used material. Read full review

As a shallow tale of conscienceless bloodshed and revenge, Last Man Standing is reasonably effective. But as an updated version of the far better-realized Yojimbo, it's an unqualified failure. Last Man Standing is a surface picture -- it looks good, sounds good, and moves quickly -- but there's no depth whatsoever. Read full review

The movie, in fact, is a lot like Willis' performance: impressive in an iconographic way, but really not nearly as much fun as it should be. It's like watching a spitting contest between totem poles. [20 Sep 1996]

Violent and cynical on the surface, impassioned and celebratory below, Last Man Standing is such a carefully stylized film that sometimes it's hard to respond to it. [20 Sep 1996, p.C]

Hill fans - and I'm one - should find Last Man Standing intriguing, but it's certainly not among his top four or five works. [20 Sep 1996, p.3E]

The film's real strength is the way it sounds, with Ry Cooder's jangling score competing with thunderous gunplay for the shell-like's appreciative attention. Read full review

Hill and his cast, including Christopher Walken as a sadistic hood, struggle to score a victory of style over substance. But substance, or a lack thereof, wins. Read full review

Last Man Standing comes to life only with rapturous gunfights that add Sam Peckinpah to the film maker's pantheon of heroes, and that are ear-splitting enough to jolt the audience out of its seats. These scenes have their firepower, but they would have larger impact if anyone cared which of the film's gangsters lived or died. Read full review

In Last Man Standing, we don’t much care; Hill is too busy crafting a classic to pull us in. Apart from those high-impact action scenes, he leeches the movie of immediacy. Read full review

If Last Man Standing is a failure, it's far from a disgrace. Its intentions seem pure; its method, precise and painstaking. You might say this movie has everything. Everything but excitement. [20 Sep 1996, p.22]

There is action galore (the deaths, by my rough count, may run somewhere in the triple digits). It's very cartoonish and not upsettingly explicit. But it's all so predictable and pointless that it quickly becomes monotonous, lulling the viewer into numbness, apathy, and perhaps even a peaceful sleep. [20 Sep 1996]

Willis is always on target, but Last Man Standing is an aimless excuse for the kind of action at which Hill undeniably excels. [20 Sep 1996, p.03]

Last Man Standing is utterly bereft of humor -- Hill plays every scene perfectly straight -- and it's a drag. There's no cleverness to Smith's machinations, no joy in watching his plans come to fruition. [20 Sep 1996, p.6G]

In this banal era of smart-aleck parodies and homages, Last Man Standing amounts to stylistic overkill. Read full review

An apparently unintentional parody of the he-man school of filmmaking, in which gunfire replaces dialogue and escalating violence passes for story development. Read full review

Hill, who brings considerably less humor to his film than Kurosawa did his, unfortunately hasn't anything new to add that makes it worth sitting through his blood baths, as skillfully staged as they are. [20 Sep 1996, p.F10]

As a thriller, the film tries to camouflage its lack of suspense with profligate and repetitive gunplay and a deafening barrage of noise (Ry Cooder's score is a plus, however). There's too much voice-over, and not enough for arch-nemesis Walken to do. but at least Willis has the hard-boiled hero down. An honourable failure. Read full review

Bruce Willis’ one-note performance and the monotonous plotting doom this New Line venture, despite the director’s typically virile staging of the numerous gun battles. Read full review

It has the distinctive look of a Walter Hill picture, but in the end boils down to little more than a Bruce Willis action vehicle. Read full review

This is a noisy, sadistic and just plain dull rendering of a too-often-told tale about a mysterious drifter who rides into a lawless outpost and pits rival gangs against each other. The plot, based on Akira Kurosawa's samurai classic Yojimbo, isn't so much dusted off by writer/director Walter Hill (Wild Bill) as propped up. [20 Sep 1996]

Last Man Standing is such a desperately cheerless film, so dry and laconic and wrung out, that you wonder if the filmmakers ever thought that in any way it could be ... fun. Read full review

Writer-director Walter Hill follows up last year’s nuanced, underrated Wild Bill with this numskull, overwrought shoot-’em-up. Read full review

Last Man Standing can't live up to its Japanese and Italian predecessors or even its title. [20 Sep 1996, p.5]