Last Man Standing Reviews

Bruce Willis, his soft little mouth curled into a perpetual smart-ass smirk, is the enigmatic drifter who pits two rival gangs of bootleggers against one another: The result is an apparently unintentional parody of the he-man school of filmmaking, in which gunfire replaces dialogue and escalating violence passes for story development. Wyatt Earp's West and Al Capone's Chicago meet in a swirling amber haze of dust and manufactured memory: Tight clusters of men in sleek suits and ties and homburg hats stand on the splintered porches of some ramshackle Western ghost town, tommy guns in hand, vintage automobiles nosed up to the hitching posts. It's a great visual conceit, layered onto a story we've all heard before. We saw it in Akira Kurasawa's YOJIMBO and Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS -- for that matter, we read it in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, the novel that brought forth the darkly evocative phrase "blood simple." Director Walter Hill can do better, and should.