Chris Reviews The Last Stand

I know I say this all the time but I freaking love 80's Action Movies. There is a certain nostalgic charm that I get when I see Dolph Lundgren and Jean Claude Van Damme beating the shit out of each other. Lucky for me the genre is making a comeback with films like the Expendables becoming popular and a great lineup of films coming out this year beginning with The Last Stand. So did the film live up to my boyhood fantasies or was it another big letdown that left me emotionally scarred. As usual read below to find out.

The Good-

Anytime I see Arnold pop up on screen now of days I want to stand up and start cheering. Unfortunately nobody else did it in the theater and I didn't want to get shushed like what happened to Kevin and I during Looper, so I restrained myself. That being said it is really freaking awesome to have Arnold back in a starring role. Arnold alone was enough to keep me interested in this film but the story was pretty interesting as well. It takes a little bit of building up but there is almost constant action that should keep the average audience member into the film. Jee-Woon Kim is a director that I have heard a lot about as he has created some very popular Korean films such as I Saw the Devil and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. He definitely gives the film a very interesting vibe and I am definitely curious to see his previous films now.

The Bad-

The acting is downright terrible in this and Arnold is extremely wooden. He seems to have lost any acting skills he had while he was governor. The writing was pretty awful as well and there were some major editing issues. The action scenes were OK but I was not as impressed as some of the critics have been. Overall The Last Stand is actually a pretty terrible film from a critical standpoint but it reaches hilarious levels of terribleness that make it fit right into the Arnold cannon of films.

Summary-

As I said before this is technically a pretty bad movie but it has a little bit of charm to it and is borderline hilariously bad. If you are an Arnold fan or the average dumb audience member then you will probably appreciate this, if not you will probably hate it. It is great to have arguably the greatest action hero in movie history back and this is definitely better than his films from the early 2000's but he has some work to do if he wants to keep his career alive.

MY RATING-

3 out of 5

-Chris "Da Franchize" Hart