THE LAST STAND

BY CHRISTOPHER HASKELL
JANUARY 19, 2013

For starters, “The Last Stand” has a great cast. Perfect casting goes to Johnny Knoxville as the gun-collecting, bumbling idiot. Peter Stormare and Eduardo Noriega are both great villains, built up effectively to face the film’s protagonists, played entirely convincingly by Jaimie Alexander, Forest Whitaker, Luis Guzman, and of course, the star of the show, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The action scenes sell the film better than anything else, with plenty of car chases, close calls, and showdowns to rival Kim Jee-Woon’s previous feature, “The Good, The Bad, and The Weird.” With a nicely paced plot progression and the impending final battle looming over the characters most of the film, the payoff is everything you’d hope it to be, with no expense (or bloodshed, thanks to the R rating) spared. Had “The Last Stand” not embraced its humorous nature, this would be a completely different review. But with a comical, redneck town mentality, and Schwarzenegger’s self-assessed aging, this is one of the best-mixed action/comedies in recent memory.