“I was born without a conscience.”

Justin’s rating: Sepia Tone: The Movie

Justin’s review: By now, many of us know the sad decline that Bruce Willis saw in the late 2010s and early 2020s due to his aphasia and an absolute glut of trash roles in trash films. It’s an incredibly depressing way for John McClane to end his career. But thanks to the ability to time travel through movies, we can revisit the high point of his career: the ’90s. It was a decade that he kicked off with Die Hard 2, ended with The Sixth Sense, and stuffed so many great adventure, scifi, drama, and action roles between them.

Perhaps one of his more forgotten ’90s efforts was an odd retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai film Yojimbo known as Last Man Standing. Transplanting the samurai culture to the 1930s gangster scene seemed intriguing, and who was I to pass up Bruce Willis in his prime double gunning down the mob on both sides of a conflict? Especially if Christopher Walken decided to join in the fun?

John Smith (Willis) gets his car roughed up by thugs while driving through the Texan town of Jericho. It’s a mostly dead town where Irish and Italian gangs vie for control, the local sheriff sits helpless, and the editor jacks up the sepia filter to maximum strength. Because it’s dusty, you see.

Instead of continuing on, Smith takes the tense standoff as a challenge — and his busted car as a motive to stick his nose where it don’t belong. Fortunately, he’s got a pair of pistols and some really good aim. Oh, and no qualms selling his services to the highest bidder. And if they both happen to be bidding high? Smith ain’t going to pause at playing both sides against each other.

Last Man Standing’s greatest strength is its willingness to combine three typically disparate genres: samurai, film noir, and western. Kurosawa’s Yojimbo was already sort of refashioned into A Fistful of Dollars, so I guess the gap was already crossed once. But to layer on top prohibition-era mooks and some clear noir elements (narration, lethal dames, a hardboiled outlook) makes it both hokey and enjoyable. It’s a flavor change, if nothing else, and I suppose one’s enjoyment is going to depend if that combination appeals.

It’s certainly not a deep movie. In fact, it’s about as shallow as they come. Jericho is a target-rich environment for an amoral gunslinger, and we get at least one eardrum-shattering gunfight every 10 minutes or so. The action bits are quite stylish and aided by a cavalcade of character actors chewing the scenery.

A box office bomb at the time, Last Man Standing’s gained some reputation in the years since for delivering excellent double-fisted gunplay. Sometimes it’s fun to watch someone splash into a shallow puddle and make a mess all over the place, after all.

Intermission!

• Oh, we do not need this pulpy voiceover, no sir
• That’s a really dead horse
• Punch right through a windshield
• You can shoot someone so hard they’ll fly out the door and across the street
• This prostitute really likes to talk
• That may be overkill for a shooting execution