Just the Ticket #154: Last Man Standing (List Lookback)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster With A Name & A Fistful Of No Dollars

a.k.a. the Blogging Spaghetti Monster

Remember when "spaghetti" used to have semi-positive connotations?

I mean, sure, the above-referenced "Flying Spaghetti Monster" is a meme-god that plays on the Cthulhu mythos and the mural from the Sistine Chapel as a symbol of the "light-hearted" perspective on monotheistic religions, but we also have modern slang usages like "creepypasta" (horror-based fan theories and urban legend rumors about various IPs or historical events) and the "Lose Yourself"-inspired usage of [Mom's] spaghetti as slang for an epic, "one shot, one opportunity" fail of comedic proportions.

But before that, there was the "Spaghetti western," an endearingly derogatory term for the practices of Sergio Leone (and his Italian filmmaker peers and successors of the time) to make cheap, profitable gunslinger films based on the Japanese samurai films of decades past (most frequently, the works of Akira Kurosawa, because, as the Barenaked Ladies once said, he "makes mad films"). The idea was simple: make the samurai characters into American cowboys, replace katana with guns, and change almost nothing else of the plot or script. This common practice of its time gave Clint Eastwood an early boost to his career, birthed such American classics as The Magnificent Seven (based on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai), the "Dollars Trilogy" with Eastwood as The Man With No Name, and Star Wars, and quite possibly influenced Haim Saban's Westernization of Super Sentai into Power Rangers, Baz Luhrmann's similar "swords are guns now" creative decisions on Romeo + Juliet, and Ralph Fiennes' adaptation of Coriolanus.

If I could find a way to cheaply and satisfyingly adapt my content to a more current platform, I would. But until then, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Not to be confused with the sitcom starring Tim Allen or the 1995 action movie of the same name starring Jeff Wincott and Jonathan Banks, 1996's Last Man Standing is a Prohibition-era gangster film (set in Texas with Southern accents, the visibility of an N64 collectathon, and the color saturation of a watered-down cafe latte, so it's basically a Western with cars, fancy suits, and Tommy guns, even though the studio said they didn't want it to be a Western at all after A Fistful Of Dollars got Leone in some legal trouble with Kurosawa back in the 60s) directed by Alien franchise producer Walter Hill (who also directed the 48Hrs movies and The Warriors), and credited as a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (the same film as A Fistful Of Dollars).

In the Toshiro Mifune/Clint Eastwood role this time is Bruce Willis as a "stop me if you've heard this one": a self-narrating badass gunman named Smith who goes to war with the criminal underworld because of a prostitute and a Romance-accented beauty with dark hair. Yes, he's basically Clive Owen's character from Shoot 'Em Up eleven years before that movie came out.

After entering the derelict town of Jericho, Texas at the whim of a spinning booze bottle, Smith is accosted and his car is vandalized by one half of the town's only population: an Irish gang run by the easily unhinged Doyle (The Crow's David Patrick Kelly, because a new Crow came out this year, and The Algorithm is always hungry). Competing with Doyle's gang in the bootlegging business are the Strozzi mafia, including Fredo Strozzi (because if The Godfather taught us anything, it's that the mafia has to have someone named Fredo in it, and he's played by Law & Order: SVU's late Ned Eisenberg) and his impulsive, idiot cousin, Giorgio (the seemingly ageless Michael Imperioli, because if The Sopranos has taught us anything, it's that he's great at playing an impulsive, idiotic goodfella). For no other visible reason than the Irish goons broke his car (and Doyle's indigenous/Mexican concubine - played by The 4400's Karina Lombard - is hot), Smith offers his services to the Strozzi family, but also for no visible reason (he claims to want to make some money, but that's clearly just a holdover from the Yojimbo script because he frequently hands out hundreds or thousands of dollars like it's nothing), starts informing on Strozzi to the Doyle family and easily gaining their confidence even though he killed several of their men. Somehow, Smith manages to play both sides and avoid getting killed by either, even after the arrival of Doyle's much-overhyped number-one, Hickey (a rather subdued and coolly menacing Christopher Walken), and the psychological warfare on display is mildly entertaining to watch, surpassed only by the too-loudly mixed gunfight sequences (almost as if, like the Doyles and Strozzis, one must choose between barely audible dialogue or being deafened by the gunfire, or else carefully navigate and anticipate the occurrences of each and adjust the volume accordingly), which feature a lot less "one against many" action than I remember, but make up for it with creative camerawork and dynamically shifting perspectives.

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about "unnecessary, soulless" remakes of nostalgically (or actually) good movies, and even before I gave Yojimbo an hour of my time for comparison's sake, Last Man Standing felt like an unnecessary, soulless remake, the crux of which was the Smith character. That isn't to say anything disparaging of Bruce Willis' portrayal; if anything, his detective noir delivery and action hero badassery are what give the character its scant redeeming charm. Smith is just a poorly-written mystery-man archetype. He has no personal stake in Jericho other than money (which he's shown to have plenty of at multiple points) and killing the goons who damaged his car (which he does a short time into the movie), and no shown or stated motivation for playing both sides (other than Ken Jenkins - Dr. Kelso from Scrubs - showing up as a plot device US Marshall character to put a ticking clock on his participation in the bloodshed). As such, John Smith is less a character than a cleansing force of subjective justice; the deus ex machina of a medieval-era religious play shoved into a protagonist slot, and it fits like a rubber glove on a porcupine's ass.

D+

I'm not at all well-versed in old Japanese cinema, aside from the time two years ago that I was going to watch every Godzilla film and gave up after the 1954 original (which was amazing, but I didn't want to watch a week's worth of subtitled runtime, and my obsessive scope creep made me think I was going to also have to watch all of the Mothra and Gamera movies), so I can't geek out over film credits like I can with American productions, but Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (Japanese for "bodyguard") is a master class in how to do atmosphere, mysterious leads, and character motivation right. At roughly fifteen minutes longer than Last Man Standing, Yojimbo has more moments of prolonged silence: breaks in dialogue, characters walking from place to place or posturing at each other, establishing shots of the derelict town, etc. But they all have atmospheric purpose.

Instead of rival bootleggers, as in the above adaptation, the yakuza families here have differing and competing vice-based enterprises (gambling vs. prostitution), and the protagonist (Toshiro Mifune's Sanjuro - a Usual Suspects-style pseudonym, according to Wikipedia) is given clear but simple motive for his change in tactics: Sanjuro has morality. Yes, he is initially just a master-less samurai looking to make money (and it's clear he has none, unlike Smith), and his overhearing the matriarch of the Seibei family planning to betray him is a clear motivator, but even before that, he has already decided that the derelict town would be better off with both families dead, and it's only a matter of waiting for the right opportunity to act.

As I said above, the hour point (the halfway mark, following Sanjuro's eavesdropping on Seibei and his wife) is where I stopped watching, partly for time constraint reasons. But while Last Man Standing should be commended for how faithful it managed to stay to the original in terms of plot beats, it's already obvious that Yojimbo is the far superior film.

I'm not a big fan of watching the same movie twice, or of watching a movie that is longer than the inferior version I watched first and requires subtitles to understand, so I might revisit Yojimbo at a later date when I don't have those stigma to bias me against it, and cannot give an honest letter grade to it just yet.

Until then and as always, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Out.