K-SCORE: 31
Director: Kim Jee-Woon
Writer: Andrew Knauer
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forest Whitaker
“Forest Whitaker... for some reason chooses to repeat all of his lines”
The first film Arnold made after his political career went tits up with an adultery scandal was The Last Stand. Interesting choice. Not a good choice, but interesting. Mainly I’m curious why he went with an original screenplay so clearly unremarkable and poorly written. There is a lot of boring expositional dialogue and myriad action cliches. The one-liners feel forced, the characters are crafted in haste with little depth despite forcefully inserted backstories, and Forest Whitaker plays an incompetent FBI agent, who, for some reason, chooses to repeat all of his lines. Entertainment survived on being able to mock that and a few wonderfully absurd choices. I seem to remember at one point one of the villanous cronies takes a bold leap off a building aiming for a truck or something and dies. Also - bonus - there are a couple characters that actually get shot successfully with automatic weapons. I’d thought that was impossible in action films.