REVIEW:
Last Man Standing is the second movie to take the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s classic samurai movie Yojimbo and turn it into a western. The first of those is the Clint Eastwood movie A Fistful of Dollars. Both movies happen to be pretty good. That’s because there’s a solid story here about a drifter who comes to town, finds about a war going on between two gangs, kills a few people to show off his value, and then gets hired by both gangs to work for them. He then spends the movie going back and forth, delivering messages and doing jobs for each gang.
In the case of this Bruce Willis movie, the story is given a lot more time than the Eastwood western. That’s both a good and.a bad thing. In the Eastwood movie, everything was very tight and to the point. One of the best things about that movie was its confined running time and how quickly it moved. Here, in Last Man Standing, the story is given the time to breathe and develop. But along with that, it also does feel a little slower than the Eastwood movie from time to time. It’s a double edged sword.
Bruce Willis, as a character who doesn’t say much, and doesn’t have much expression, is pretty good. This movie uses voice over, the way a black and white noir detective movie might, and it works. The two gangs are also a lot of fun, with each one feeling very different, and with our protagonist getting to spend a solid amount of time with each. This is also an advantage of this movie, over the Eastwood one. In that movie, it felt like the Stranger only got to spend real time with one of the gangs. Here, he is clearly going back and forth. So the story and the atmosphere are both pretty good. The action is nothing special. Lots of shootouts, none of them memorable. That’s okay though, because our minds are distracted by the plot and trying to keep track of different characters and remember who is in each gang. Playing that game, of trying to get to know the gangs and watching as Willis manipulates them, turns out to be a lot of fun. This movie is better than one might expect, and a solid take on the story.