Last Man Standing

Bruce Willis was undoubtedly hoping for a little non-"Die Hard" artistic action when he hired on with filmmaker Walter Hill for a remake of Akira Kurosawa's samurai classic "Yojimbo" (1961).

Of course, Willis was probably thinking of Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964), the spaghetti Western that made a star of Clint Eastwood, and which was also derived from the Kurosawa film.

But turning a samurai picture into a Western is merely a cultural leap, while setting the same story in a nearly deserted west Texas town with warring bootleggers during the Depression is something else again. (What we have here is a new genre combination — the gangster-Western, the first and most likely the last of its kind.)

Plotwise, there is no logical reason for most of what happens in this setting, and Hill's mystical overtones and religious imagery seem wildly out of place.

Add to that the even more distressing philosophy that no one should be killed with one bullet when a hundred will do the job (and splatter a lot more blood), and you have a movie that fails on too many levels to be even mildly entertaining.

"Last Man Standing" begins with Willis driving through a little Texas town called Jericho, about 50 miles north of Mexico, and which resembles those backlot, storefront streets from old John Wayne movies.

Willis drives up Main Street slowly. The camera closes in on a dead horse in the road, covered with flies, and observes the tumbling tumble weeds that blow by. Then he makes the mistake of eyeing a beautiful woman who is being escorted across the street and finds his car surrounded by mobsters in pin-stripe suits. "I got a look at her," Willis says in a voice-over narration, "and that's when all the fun started."

They mess up his car, but when Willis goes to the sheriff (Bruce Dern), he is simply warned to get out of town. While his car is being repaired, Willis approaches the mobsters, calls out the leader of the pack and blows him away. Then he goes across the street and negotiates with a gang of rival mobsters.

It seems an Irish gang and an Italian gang are in Jericho to smuggle bootleg booze across the border. So, Willis sets up a cat-and-mouse game to play both ends against the middle. It isn't long, however, before it all becomes redundant, as Willis wipes out one side, then the other, or sets them up to wipe out each other.

Like Hill's atmospheric direction, Willis' performance is dark and deadpan, but somewhat flat. He gets very little clever dialogue to offset the moody trappings and over-the-top violence. (When Willis draws his guns, often rapidly firing two at the same time, the camera moves in to make the barrels loom even larger.)

Even Christopher Walken, introduced as a bizarre villain (or is that redundant?) with a scarred face, a gravelly voice and an ever-present Tommy gun, fails to deliver because he doesn't have anything witty to do. (Their first encounter is the film's best scene, but nothing else lives up to its promise. The dry-as-a-bone dialogue is more prone to posturing, as when Willis says, "Everybody ends up dead — it's just a matter of when.")

Anachronistic to a fault, but without enough humor or inventive action to might make the proceedings palatable, "Last Man Standing" is probably what Hill considers a man's movie. That is, people get beat up, the villains are all blown away in a barrage of bullets and a semibad man finds some modicum of redemption in the end.

Hill's uneven career has produced some highly entertaining pictures ("The Long Riders," "The Warriors," "48HRS."), and some that are pretty awful ("Red Heat," "Johnny Handsome," "Brewster's Millions").

Sadly, after all these years, Hill still hasn't learned that stylstic cinematography (the film is sepia tinted, without any real colors showing through), explosive violence and big stars are not enough.

"Last Man Standing" is rated R for considerable violence and gore, along with some sex, nudity and profane language.