Arnold's Lackadaisical 'Last Stand'
Schwarzenegger is the big draw here, and he seems to be having a reasonably good time, getting roughed up here and there and putting his trademark "What, me worry?" line delivery to use. (His scenes with the eternal goofball Knoxville are the nuttiest and perhaps the best.)
The Last Stand was directed by Korean cult-favorite filmmaker Kim Jee-woon, whose previous pictures include the rambunctious 2008 noodle Western The Good, the Bad, the Weird and, from 2003, A Tale of Two Sisters, a dreamy, enigmatic bit of free-verse horror.
The Last Stand isn't as effective as either of those movies. Its attempts at violent humor are scattershot, though occasionally Jee-woon and his actors hit the mark. (The sight of crazy old Knoxville using a flare gun as an assault weapon works like a charm, for instance.) But most of the action sequences are indistinctly shot and choppily edited; they flip by in a blur of noise.
The director does pull off a pretty magnificent cornfield car chase — two sleek vehicles cut through a thick, shaggy carpet of maize like souped-up harvesters, the movie's way of saying that the simple country life needn't be devoid of thrills. But Jee-woon takes too long to wrap things up, fumbling repeatedly on his way to an ending. By the end, even Schwarzenegger looks worn out. Maybe being governor wasn't such a hard job after all.