High body count and serious subtext sucks the fun out of The Last Stand

Well, he said he’d “be back.” And Arnold Schwarzenegger is back, alright, delivering those simple-minded one-liners with an accent as thick as always in The Last Stand, a new action film that picks up where all his crappy action films from the late ’90s left off. At least Schwarzenegger acts his age here as he plays Sheriff Ray Owens, a big city cop who has retired to a sleepy Arizona town because he got sick of working the narcotics beat in L.A.

Ray is in the middle of enjoying a day off when he gets some disturbing news that the town’s relentlessly reliable farmer (Harry Dean Stanton) didn’t show up to deliver milk to the local diner. After discovering the old man murdered, he gets a call from the FBI to warn him that a fugitive might be heading his way. That’s when the trouble begins.

Despite the fact the FBI is unable to get a SWAT team to town to help him out, Ray is determined to make a stand and ensure that Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega), a dangerous drug lord making a run for the border in a souped-up Corvette, doesn’t come through his town without encountering some resistance. So Ray gets together a motley crew of townspeople and law enforcement officials to create a barricade and deputizes crazed gun collector Lewis Dinkum (Johnny Knoxville) to supply them with ammunition and artillery.

The film’s plot is telegraphed from the start. We know that there’ll be a showdown between Ray and Gabriel. And we know that Ray’s deputies will have to step up their game if they want to stop the bad guys from getting back to Mexico. While it’s still a ride, it’s not quite as fun as it could be. South Korean director Kim Ji-Woon balanced humor and violence adroitly in 2008’s terrific The Good, the Bad, the Weird, but something gets lost in translation here. The film has such a high body count and serious subtext that the comedy suffers as a result. Schwarzenegger is good at adding some self-deprecating humor, but the script doesn’t let him camp it up as much as he could.   Knoxville always makes for a good jackass and is up for the part here, but he’s underutilized.  The same goes for Luis Guzman, who plays Ray’s least heroic deputy and has all the film’s best lines.