"Cryptozoo" feels like a throwback to the late 1970s or early '80s -- an animated movie that is very much adult in tone and content, presenting a story that is both fanciful and cutting. There's lots of violence and nudity, though leavened with an environmental/moral message, making the whole enterprise seem like a more enlightened version of "Heavy Metal."
The story, set in the late 1960s, is about the world hiding multitudes of cryptids, or mythological creatures, that various factions of humanity want to exploit or help. Some of the cryptids are dangerous and beastly, others very human-like and intelligent. They're constantly in danger of being discovered, captured and sold into servitude.
There are mammoth scorpions, tiny imp-like critters, a South American snake as big as a skyscraper, figures with no head but a face on their torso, unicorns, pegasi, dragons and cryptids that are just dancing balls of light.
The film features voices by some name actors including Lake Bell, Michael Cera, Zoe Kazan and Peter Stormare. Written and directed by Dash Shaw, it features an animation team led by Jane Samborski. At first glance, the animation (largely hand-drawn, I believe) may seem to lack the sharpness and polish of what we've become used to, possibly even bordering an amateurish.
"Minority Report" is the most un-Spielberg film ever made by Steven Spielberg.
There is plenty of heartbreak and sadness in Spielberg's movies. Certainly fractured families are a central theme. He's made movies about the Holocaust, D-Day and World War I trenches. The film he made right before this one was "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," in which bereaved parents replace their dying son with a robot who's been tricked into thinking he's a real boy.
And yet, there is an undercurrent of light and hopefulness in his oeuvre that I find (mostly) missing in "Minority Report," though "A.I." probably comes closest in its dystopian themes and dour mood.
In both movies technology has led to seemingly amazing achievements to benefit society, but there's an insidious bargain underneath that threatens to upend the balance. That's not surprising since it was based on a short story by the immortal Philip K. Dick, whose fears about the future essentially created its own film genre, tech noir. It was adapted for the screen by John Cohen and Scott Frank.
I remember liking the film when it came out but not being amazed as other critics were. One of the areas I still find it lacking is the sense of an entire world being built around star Tom Cruise. Instead, it seems like Spielberg and his team created just enough pieces to serve as a backdrop, and no more. He doesn't paint in the corners.
There are the automated cars that move both horizontally and vertically, but other than a chase scene where Cruise leaps from vehicle to vehicle, they're not really explored as a (literally) transportive societal evolution. Things seem... pretty well the same as they are now. They even have The Gap, in a self-reflexive bit of product placement.
Though maybe the sameness is a commentary in and of itself.
Set in the year 2054, the film has been pointed to as being prescient in its depiction of coming technological upheaval. We obviously don't have the ability to predict the future or record thoughts into a video stream, though VR headsets can do a pretty good job of putting you into a created reality. And the mind-altering drug people use in the film, neuroin, bears disturbing similarities to the opioid epidemic of today.
All the newspapers and magazines automatically update with the latest headlines, which if you were in the news business in the early Aughts, the talk of "e-paper" being the format of the future was all the rage. Instead we turned to reading on hard, graceless, 4-inch screens.
Most interesting is the ever-present eye scanners, taking a cool gadget that's a staple of the spy and sci-fi genres and turning it into an intimating facet of a world where our movements are continuously tracked -- ostensibly for consumerist purposes, but as we quickly see the government is piggybacking on the gaze.
We don't use "eye-D," as it's called in the movie, so ubiquitously or without consent. But think about how our online explorations are customized through cookies and trackable data. Everyone knows how they've searched for a product and then seen ads for similar wares plastering our web carousing. Or getting a report every month from Google Maps telling you exactly where you've been, and when.
Most of us would be mortified to have our browser history made public. In the world of "Minority Report," everything about us is on continual surveillance and display, up to and including the things we think about doing. Literally, people are arrested and punished for things they were about to do.
The story is at its root a meditation on free will and predestination. Usually such tales are set against a theological backdrop -- if God determines our path, how are we really free to choose?
As a good Catholic boy growing up, I was instructed that thinking about committing an act is just a much a sin as actually doing it. This was taught as a way to forbid sinful thoughts, but as any pubescent soon realized, they're as impossible to shut out as the old saw of "Don't think about elephants."
I think it was George Carlin who observed that the majority of Catholics who lapsed figured out that if you were going to be punished equally for thinking about doing something, you might as well experience the fun of actually doing it.
("I'll take glaring holes in catechism for $1,000, Alex.")
The film largely eschews religious issues, other than the decoration of some people considering the three "precogs" as deities unto themselves. They are children born of early neuroin users with psychic gifts, which used in conjunction can read people's evil intents before even they themselves are aware of them.
Of course, this also involves being imprisoned in a floating "milk bath" that heightens their powers, kept eternally pumped full of hallucinogens and fawned over by a quite possibly lecherous keeper, Wally (Daniel London).
Agatha (Samantha Morton) is the "most gifted" of the three, twins Dashiell and Arthur basically serving as assist men to the true genius. The three are named after famous mystery writers, and were trained by Dr. Hineman (Lois Smith), now living out her days in lonesome regret.
As is often the case in real life, the creative partner was outlasted and outmaneuvered by the business shark, in this case Max von Sydow as Lamar Burgess, who is now desperate to take the "PreCrime" experiment from Washington D.C. to a national stage. This means jumping through small hoops held by big people.
Hence the arrival of the inquisitive mind of Danny Witwer, a wolf-like young assistant attorney general played by Colin Farrell in his breakout role in American films. He instantly focuses his attention on Chief John Anderton (Cruise), who is the heroic public face of PreCrime. John lost his own son in a bizarre abduction at a public swimming pool years earlier, tanking his marriage to Lara (Kathryn Morris) and turning him into a stealth neuroin user.
In early scene, John goes jogging through the shady part of D.C., his real purpose to obtain a fix, which he uses to heighten his mood while watching (crude) holographic home movies of his lost kid. The blind dealer removes his glasses to reveal cavernous empty eye sockets, seemingly revealing his very brains, with the admonishment, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king!"
Watching the movie again, this line heralds a lot of high-contrast photography by cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, including a plethora of shots where one of a character's eyes are turned away or lost in shadow.
For me, the faster the movie's plot-stirring gets, the more I tend to lose interest as it gets into pure chase-chase mode. Neal McDonough plays Fletch, John's former right-hand man now charged with leading the hunt for him. "Everybody runs" is their mantra, leading to some slick action scenes with flying power suits and "sick sticks," glowing batons that instantly make their target retch.
In one of the movie's coolest but most inscrutable sequences, John goes to have his eyes swapped out in a black market procedure to fool the eye-D scans.
Peter Stormare plays the bottom-bucket doctor, who blows snot all over his hand right before sucking out John's eyeballs. In a riveting soliloquy, the not-good doctor reminds John -- now addled by anesthesia -- that the chief locked him away years ago for intentionally setting his patients on fire, and now back-alley eye jobs are the only medical work he can do.
It revs up to a classic "I shall have my revenge" declaration:
"For true enlightenment there is nothing like... well, let's just say taking a shower while this large fellow with an attitude you couldn't knock down with a hammer, that keeps whispering in your ear: 'Oh Nancy, Oh Nancy.' Now that was a lot of fun, thank you so very much John for putting me in there, thank you so very much for giving me an opportunity to get to know myself much better."
As near as I can figure, though, the doc never actually extracts any kind of revenge. He competently performs his job, at less than his usual rate, even. John has a nasty encounter with a putrid sandwich and spoiled milk placed in the fridge of his recovery flophouse, though they appear to be genuine accidents as he blindly reaches on the wrong shelf from where the fresh sustenance lies.
As much as I enjoy Stormare's effortless creepy presence and off-kilter line readings, this whole bit feels like a buildup to an important moment that never arrives. I believe the whole thing could be chopped down to quick montage and improve the pacing. Though this would maybe suck some of the life out of the subsequent house search by tiny "spiders," disc-like robots with wire-thin appendages deployed by the PreCrime brutes to infiltrate and forcibly eye-D people
Hence Cruise's green eyes become dark brown halfway through the movie. He keeps the old eyes in a plastic biggie to sneak back into the PreCrime HQ (no one thinking to lock out his profile, apparently) with the intent to have them put back one day, but comically loses one down a drain.
Tim Blake Nelson turns up as Gideon, the wheelchair-deployed officiate of the PreCrime "prison" where reside people judged and sentenced without actually committing any dastardly acts. They lie forever dreaming in plastic tubes, wearing coma-inducing "halos" around their heads like fallen angels as Gideon plays them orgiastic organ music to calm their prematurely damned souls.
As Nelson brings an innate disquieting anxiety to his roles, one instantly wonders if, like Wally, Gideon is supplanting his official duties with an occasional tug 'n' grope of his comelier charges.
John himself is briefly sentenced to the halo prison, his long run finally ending due to the machinations of Burgess, who is using his protege as the sacrificial pawn to ensure PreCrime is cleared for a national rollout. Lara springs him... surprisingly easily, and many have wondered if the film's entire last act is a big guffaw and everything we've seen is merely the imaginings of John, still trapped in his plastic prison on a never-ending high.
This would, of course, be a mirror of the finale of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," one of my all-time favorite films and a clear inheritor of Philip K. Dick's prescient, precious paranoia. His cinematic children were legion, even without an official credit.
And while I don't think "Minority Report" is among the finest of the adaptations, it's a film that has aged rather well in nearly a couple of clicks down the big highway. There was even a briefly lived TV series a few years ago that came and went without me (or anyone) much noticing.
Things end on a (somewhat artificial) high note -- Burgess slain by his own hand, PreCrime disbanded and the not-yet criminals released, Agatha and the twins relocated from their enforced isolation in the pool to a self-imposed one in a lonely cottage on a Scottish cliff or wherever, free to live in the now and not the future.
John even caresses the swelling belly of Lara, their love reborn with another life and shot at parenthood. It seems that free will does reign, along with happy endings in Spielberg flicks -- even if it takes two-plus hours of haunting parable to get there.
The best thing about the John Wick movies is that they do not pretend to be anything other than what they are: slick, ultra-violent escapism that mixes a grim revenge saga with gallows humor.
Keanu Reeves reprises his role as the reluctant hitman pulled back into a world of murder and double-crosses. Also returning is screenwriter Derek Kolstad, who dreamed up this nutty, vibrant world, and Chad Stahelski, a longtime stuntman and coordinator handpicked as director.
The actors and crew seem perfectly aligned in their goal, which is to deliver kick-ass mayhem with a minimum of fat or fuss.
Things pick up almost exactly where they left off. Wick completes his revenge on the Russian mobsters who killed his dog and stole his classic Mustang, with much damage to said pony car. Then new trouble surfaces: Santino D’Antonio (Ricardo Scamarcio), an Italian crime lord who wants Wick to knock off his sister so he can take her seat at the High Table – a sort of United Nations for villains.
Wick takes some convincing, but finally takes on the assignment.
There’s the usual army of disposable henchmen to take on, as well as a few elites: Common and Ruby Rose play veteran assassins who know Wick’s reputation from the old days. Wick gives better than he gets, but he still gets gradually worn down: pummeled, slashed, shot. He keeps going, if a bit more awkwardly with each step.
The stunts are the star of “John Wick 2,” and it’s a thrilling mix of amazing action that happens at a believable speed. Stahelski largely shoots Reeves in full body without a lot of cuts, so we can actually see the violence play out.
The ending makes no pretenses about setting up a “John Wick 3,” and I for one am happy to sign on for another ride.
Bonus features are good, anchored by a feature-length commentary track with Reeves and Stahelski. The best commentaries usually include input from both stars and filmmakers. The DVD edition also has two featurettes: “As Above, So Below: The Underworld of John Wick” and “RetroWick: Exploring the Unexpected Success of John Wick.”
Upgrade to the Blu-ray version, and you add seven more featurettes touching on various aspects of production, including a “Kill Count” just in case you were wondering how many people Wick offs during the movie. (It’s impressive.) Finally, there is a bonus short film, “Dog Wick.”
There was a certain feral purity to 2014’s “John Wick.” It was your standard chop-socky-and-gunplay action flick featuring a faded star, with one notable departure: the reason behind the orgy of blood made absolutely no sense.
I mean, what kind of retired assassin goes on a killing spree simply because some Russian goons stole his car and killed his puppy? Even if the latter was a posthumous gift from his recently departed wife? The sheer absurdity of the revenge motivation gave the movie a sort of bent edge -- suggesting that the eponymous killer may have just been using it as an unconscious excuse to dive back into this old life.
(Plus, I love puppies but they’re easily replaced. 1969 Mustang Boss 429s, on the other hand, don’t just grow on trees. #Priorities, man.)
The sequel takes up almost literally at the moment the last one ended, with John Wick (Keanu Reeves) wrapping things up with the Russians and reclaiming his ride -- though not without collateral damage. (If the filmmakers did that to a real 429, we hates them forever.)
“John Wick: Chapter 2” is stylistically a retread of the first, though it takes us deeper into the lore of the underground assassins’ world that we stuck a toe into in the first movie. We learn of a “High Table” of crime syndicates, whom the assassins serve using their own complex set of rules.
This infrastructure includes “The Continental,” a fancy New York hotel that’s neutral ground where the killers can rest, heal and rearm. The manager, Winston (Ian McShane), enforces the house policy with severe exactitude. Now we learn there are Continentals in virtually every major city, including Rome, where most of the action takes place. Wick doles out gold coins accumulated during his gun-for-hire days to pay his way.
It turns out that Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio), an Italian crime family prince, has a “marker” from John Wick, a promise to repay an old debt no matter what. Santino wants to kill his sister, Gianna (Claudia Gerini), so he can take her place at the High Table. Of course, Wick has sworn off his old life and will need… convincing.
Stunts are at the heart of “John Wick: Chapter 2,” so it’s no surprise it was directed by longtime stunt coordinator Chad Stahelski, who made his debut behind the camera with the last movie. Derek Kolstad returns as script man.
I like that the mayhem happens at a believable speed, without a whole lot of fast editing to cover up the choreography. Wick’s signature move is spinning around multiple opponents, grappling them and disabling with shots or kicks, and then finishing them off with a cap to the head.
Wick’s good, of course, but so is everybody else, and he takes a lot of hits that slow him down. For instance, when he gets stabbed in the leg, he limps for the rest of the movie. And his face gets gradually chewed up into dog food.
New opponents this go-round are Common as Cassian, an old pro in the game with a shared history and respect, and Ruby Rose as Ares, the chief lieutenant for Santino. Rose makes an impression with her boyish suits and haircut, and the fact her character is mute. Conveniently, Wick speaks sign language, so they can taunt each other via subtitles.
Laurence Fishburne turns up as a sort of shambolic king of the homeless underground, and John Leguizamo returns in a cameo as Wick’s friend and able mechanic.
Like a lot of Keanu Reeves’ performances, this one is rather hard to penetrate. Depending on the material, he can seem cool or wooden. He under-acts to the point of seeming like he doesn’t care about the talkie scenes, and is saving his energy for the fights.
I like that he doesn’t have the sort of snarly bravado we’re used to in action heroes; his John Wick genuinely seems like he’d rather be sitting around his mansion doing Sad Keanu memes, or anything else.
This movie vibrantly carries on the John Wick story, satisfactorily expands upon its world and makes no bones about setting up a part three. It even offers a possible reason why he gave such a damn about that vehicle -- beyond the fact that it’s the greatest muscle car ever made, of course.
The “Madagascar” movies have run their course, and if spinning off the cute penguin sidekicks into their own movie seems like a cheap grab for more bucks, that’s because it is.
There really is no reason for this film to exist, or more accurately there is no reason for it to exist as a film. Lots of animated movie franchises now replicate themselves into straight-to-video shorts, including “Toy Story,” “Shrek” and “Kung Fu Panda.” There’s no shame in it – my kids love to watch these off the DVR or Netflix.
The problem comes in taking a story that is all television and trying to pass it off as a whole movie. “Penguins of Madagascar” is like that. The trio of screenwriters are all TV guys, and it shows. It’s just a bunch of goofy jokes and antic capers with barely a story thread to connect them.
It likely will keep wee ones entertained, though adults may find their eyelids growing droopy (as did I).
As you’ll recall, the running joke about the penguins is that they act like secret agent men. Their chief, Skipper (voice of Tom McGrath), talks like a G-man from a 1950s television show. Of course, it’s funny that clownish, winsome penguins act like mini-James Bondses … for a while. Trying to run out the gag for 92 minutes quickly grows weary.
To help string it along, they add an extra dimension: the youngest penguin, Private (Christopher Knights), is the adorable mascot of the foursome, beloved more for his endearing ways and looks than as integral member of the team. Over the course of the show… er, excuse me, movie, he gets to grow in their esteem.
The other two penguins are Kowalski (Chris Miller), Skipper’s right-hand man and teller of truths, even when inconvenient and upsetting; Rico (Conrad Vernon) has a penchant for swallowing things, and blowing stuff up, and swallowing things that later blow up after he’s expectorated them.
John Malkovich is really good as the heavy, an octopus named Dave who sometimes masquerades as a human scientist who looks exactly like Dwight Schrute from “The Office.” It seems he’s a former zoo resident who hated having his limelight stolen by penguins, and now he’s created an energy ray that makes them less pretty, or something.
(Sorry if I’m a little fuzzy on the details; seriously, I think I may have nodded off.)
The X-factor in the story is another team of group of critter agents. They call themselves the North Wind, as all the animals are arctic-oriented, and they drive the penguins mad with jealousy because of all their cool equipment and vehicles. Compared to them, the penguins are old-school amateurs.
The interlopers are: Agent Classified (Benedict Cumberbatch) – his name isn’t classified; it’s actually “Classified”; Short Fuse (Ken Jeong), a peevish seal; Eva (Annet Mahendru), an alluring snow owl; and Corporal (Peter Stormare), a Russian polar bear who acts as the outfit’s muscle.
The humor is largely of the slapstick-and-bodily-emissions variety, perfectly suited to the kindergarten crowd. Co-directors Eric Darnell and Simon J. Smith stage action scenes that are generally pretty coherent.
There are also a few in-jokes scattered throughout the dialogue, in which names of celebrities are buried inside seemingly mundane chatter: “Elijah, would you hand me that?” And listen carefully to the narrator at the beginning – it’s probably the best laugh of the movie, for those who get it.
I tittered at a few of these, while recognizing this movie was not made for me. Or anyone who counts their age in double digits.
If you're tempted to make a joke about "22 Jump Street," the sequel to the hit comedy starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, continuing with future iterations of "23 Jump Street," and so on, don't bother. The movie has already beaten you to the punch at poking fun at itself.
In fact, one of the most refreshing thing about this reboot of the 1980s TV show is that it gleefully wallows in its own crass commercialism. It's a wicked send-up of not only the whole buddy-cop genre, but of itself.
Our film comedies have now reached the level of ironic detachment where the snake is eating its own tail. Nothing we see is meant to be taken at face value. So the stars aren't playing the roles of undercover cops posing as college students -- one the brainy dweeb and the other the lunkhead bruiser -- but the parody versions of them.
At one point, Hill and Tatum walk into their new "undercover" police headquarters, which happens to be right across the street from their old one. Next door, the "23 Jump Street Apartments" are currently under construction.
If you think that's hip and hilarious, wait till the end credits, which takes the same joke and runs it into the end zone, spikes the ball, bursts out of the stadium into the parking lot, and keeps going.
After inept rookie cops Schmidt and Jenko (Hill and Tatum, respectively) managed to break up a huge high school drug ring, they're tasked with doing the same thing again at MC State. When Schmidt tries to suggest other approaches, their deputy chief (Nick Offerman) sternly enforces the rule of sequels: do exactly the same thing as last time.
This they do, with the socially awkward Schmidt struggling to fit into the college party scene, while Jenko makes the football team as a walk-on and bonds with their charismatic quarterback (Wyatt Russell), who may or may not be lynchpin of campus narcotics trafficking.
The specifics of the plot are so tiresome that co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and their trio of screenwriters barely even bother to pay attention to them. The movie mostly jumps from scene to scene, generally involving Hill and Tatum spewing out motormouth gibberish, making fools of themselves while also commenting on the proceedings as they're unfolding. The movie doesn't so much do jokes as stages uncomfortable situations.
This is the comedy of embarrassment. Much of this is painful to watch, and in seeing our boys squirm we are intended to derive laughs.
And there are a lot of them, though there are long stretches in the middle where we feel more sorry for the people we're following than amused by them.
The lead actors are both in their 30s, and look it, and one of the running gags is that absolutely no one they meet believes they are college age.
"I'm 19," Schmidt says, straight-faced.
"Nineteen minutes late to the pinochle game?" a snarky girl responds.
After awhile, though, the shtick starts to wear thin and we know everything that's going to happen -- like that no gunfight can commence without an extended back-and-forth of insults and quips between the antagonists.
At nearly two hours long, "22 Jump Street" far outstays its welcome. Like an actual college party, it's raucous and intoxicating for awhile, but after 90 minutes you've seen all there is to see, and the music shuffle starts to repeat.
My favorite part of “The Last Stand” is the very end. After over-the-hill sheriff Ray Owens has fought off a small horde of Mexican gangsters invading his dusty border town, he rests on the sidewalk, bloodied and beat. He struggles to get to his feet, and a younger man offers a hand. Ray glares at that outstretched hand, peeved that it is seen as necessary. Then he gives up and accepts the help.
At 65, Arnold Schwarzenegger no longer resembles a superhero, just a tough old-timer with a few tricks left. After giving up superstardom for politics, Arnie attempted a comeback with this throwback action thriller. Audiences stayed away, perhaps because of recent revelations about his personal life.
Judged solely on its merits, “The Last Stand” is an effective if unoriginal action flick. It takes a while to get rolling, but after the 45-minute mark it’s an enjoyable orgy of gunfire and explosions.
The set-up is that a Mexican drug cartel kingpin (Eduardo Noriega) has escaped from federal custody and is zooming toward the border in a super-charged Corvette prototype. With the help of an elaborately planned escape, he’s gotten away clean, and only Sheriff Owens and a small passel of misfit deputies stands between him and freedom.
Johnny Knoxville is a hoot as a local gun-loving coot, while Luis Guzman is Ray’s overly cautious right-hand man. Rodrigo is the very recently deputized town drunk – and ex-Marine – while Jamie Alexander rounds out the cast as the lone, able female cop.
Korean director Jee-woon Kim knows how to stage action scenes so they’re exciting while still remaining grounded in the laws of physics.
And Schwarzenegger has a comfortable, easy grace playing a regular guy who becomes a reluctant hero. The box office receipts may disagree, but the Austrian Oak still has action-star bona fides.
Both the Blu-ray and DVD versions come with a decent amount of goodies. There’s a making-of documentary short and three other featurettes focusing on various aspects of production, plus a handful of deleted and alternate scenes.
Just a quick review/rumination on "The Last Stand" today. Nick Rogers is handling the main review over at The Film Yap, so head over there to check that out for a more complete take.
I see "The Last Stand" as a marker. It's less a movie meant to be enjoyed in its own right than a question for the audience, and the Hollywood machine. And that is: Can Arnold still cut it as an action star?
Based on this old-school shoot-em-up, ably directed by Korean filmmaker Jee-woon Kim, I'd say the answer is definitively yes.
The movie itself is big, dumb and loud. It's one of those flicks where the audience is encouraged not to think much about whether the plot makes a lick of sense or if the characters are thicker than plywood. It's one big excuse to dive into a whole lot of gunfire and mayhem, interrupted by funny bits and Schwarzenegger's patented quips.
"The Last Stand" takes its own good time to get rolling -- the screenplay doesn't really take off until the 45-minute mark -- but once the explosions and machine gun fire starts up, it's a glibly visceral thrill ride the rest of the way.
The plot is straight and simple: a Mexican drug cartel chieftain named Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) has escaped from the feds during a bold breakout in Las Vegas. He's driving a hyper-fast Corvette prototype toward the sleepy Arizona border town of Sommerton Junction. After the various federal law enforcement agencies muck up the job, it's up to the local sheriff, Ray Owens, and his three deputies to stop Cortez.
Now, Schwarzenegger does not look like a "Ray" or an "Owens," but he fits comfortably into the town's laid back culture. We later learn he was once a hotshot Los Angeles narcotics cop who gave up the fast lane 20 years ago to detox in Sommerton.
It's sort of funny to think about the fact that the Austrian Oak has lived in America for 40 years or so, but his thick wiener-schnitzel accent hasn't diminished one iota. Still, it's clear that despite his name and speech, Ray isn't a native -- at one point he tells the bad guy, "You make us immigrants look bad."
Arnie is still a badass in this movie, but a more down-to-earth and human one. He looks a mite stiff and slow during the fight scenes. Schwarzenegger also seems physically smaller, like a Norse titan cut down to size by his earthly existence. I noticed he appeared shorter than a number of his male co-stars. My memory of him is that he towers -- and glowers -- over everyone else.
Other cast members include Johnn Knoxville as Dinkum, the local screwball who operates an ersatz firearms museum -- open every third Thursday of the month, noon to 3 -- just so he can legally own all sorts of high-powered weaponry that will come in handy later. Peter Stormare has a fun role as the kingpin's henchmen, who dresses like an Old West dandy and even fights with an ancient six-shooter.
Luis Guzman is Ray's right-hand man, who suggests they look the other way when the heat comes, but walks tall in the end. Rodrigo Santoro is the town drunk, who happens to be an ex-Marine. And Jamie Alexander is convincing as the only female cop.
At age 65, how many more movies like this does Arnold Schwarzenegger have left in him? I'd like to think a few -- especially if he comes back in other roles like this where he's not playing a superman, but just a tough old-timer with a few tricks left in him.
Personally, I would love to see him make some more Conan movies -- as I often point out to people, the original Robert E. Howard books took the character out to age 70 or so.
The most telling moment in "The Last Stand" comes at the end. Having defeated the bad guy -- what, you didn't think he would? -- the sheriff is sitting on the curb, torn up and bloody from his travails. Over walks the FBI chief (Forest Whitaker) who had been overseeing the chase from afar, offering Ray information, advice and not a little condescension.
Ray goes to stand up, struggles to do so, and the G-man holds out a hand to help him up. He glares at the outstretched hand, clearly peeved that it is seen as being necessary. Then he winces with pain, bows to the inevitable and lets the younger man help him to his feet.
Time catches us all, and even the biggest action movies stars should have the grace to acknowledge it.
