Last Man Standing

From Lloyd Ahern's breathtaking, earth-toned cinematography to Freeman Davies' uncommonly graceful editing, Last Man Standing is a real class act, an old-fashioned thriller propelled by wildly violent, decidedly modern action sequences.

The movie, in fact, is a lot like Willis' performance: impressive in an iconographic way, but really not nearly as much fun as it should be. It's like watching a spitting contest between totem poles. [20 Sep 1996]

Last Man Standing is utterly bereft of humor -- Hill plays every scene perfectly straight -- and it's a drag. There's no cleverness to Smith's machinations, no joy in watching his plans come to fruition. [20 Sep 1996, p.6G]

In Last Man Standing, we don’t much care; Hill is too busy crafting a classic to pull us in. Apart from those high-impact action scenes, he leeches the movie of immediacy.

Bruce Willis’ one-note performance and the monotonous plotting doom this New Line venture, despite the director’s typically virile staging of the numerous gun battles.

This is a noisy, sadistic and just plain dull rendering of a too-often-told tale about a mysterious drifter who rides into a lawless outpost and pits rival gangs against each other. The plot, based on Akira Kurosawa's samurai classic Yojimbo, isn't so much dusted off by writer/director Walter Hill (Wild Bill) as propped up. [20 Sep 1996]

Last Man Standing is such a desperately cheerless film, so dry and laconic and wrung out, that you wonder if the filmmakers ever thought that in any way it could be ... fun.