Continuing the grand tradition of the Western — and the current p.r. campaign of the NRA — “The Last Stand” celebrates the philosophy that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, returning to the big screen after taking an almost decade-long hiatus to govern California, is small-town sheriff Ray Owens, who thinks he’s got a nice quiet weekend coming to him. Many of the locals are away at a football game, and what could possibly happen in a sleepy enclave of stock characters like Sommerton?
In the hands of Korean director Kim Jee-Woon (“The Good, the Bad, the Weird”), quite a lot of nastiness, if not originality. Mexican drug kingpin Gabriel Cortez (an icy Eduardo Noriega) masterminds a jailbreak that sees him speeding toward the border in a Corvette ZR1, a car so cool it rivals Arnold as the real star of this picture. He’s got an FBI agent hostage (Genesis Rodriguez) at his side, and the agency — headed by Forest Whitaker — is in hot pursuit.
Preceding Cortez’s arrival in Sommerton is a gang of apocalyptic henchmen, headed by the reliably ominous Peter Stormare. They lay siege to local lawmen and force Ray and his deputies (Luis Guzmán, Jaimie Alexander, Rodrigo Santoro, Zach Gilford) to take — you guessed it — a last stand, aided by Johnny Knoxville as a loonyantique-firearms collector.
Arnold, snapping back into action-hero mode with a leathery ease, capably wields a gun and a lame one-liner, just as if he never left. Shootout after shootout ensues, with Sheriff Ray proving you don’t need a fancy-pants automatic weapon to blow someone’s head apart like a ripe watermelon.
Here’s where “The Last Stand” departs from its Western influences; back in the day, cowboys were bumped off in a relatively genteel manner. The firepower here, whether it’s the high-tech weaponry of the drug cartel or Knoxville’s WWII tommy gun, means nobody is simply shot — they’re splattered, disintegrated. One fleeing villain’s torso is blasted to smithereens, leaving just his momentarily standing legs.
Even a local granny gets in on the action, whipping a shotgun out from behind her rocking chair to waste a Mexican intruder. “Put the hurt on ’em!” she cackles at Ray.
Sure, violence in movies isn’t violence in real life. And when you combine it with intelligent dialogue and pointed social commentary (a la “Django Unchained”), it can be cathartic. But “The Last Stand,” absent either of these things, just seems to want to gin up a lot of high-fiving for a lot of shooting, and right now is the least palatable time I can think of for that.