REVIEW: Arnold Schwarzenegger Is Back In Dumb, Fun ?Last Stand?
?Welcome to Sommerton!? growls Arnold Schwarzenegger in his comeback flick, the ultra-bloody shoot-em-up The Last Stand. As Arnie catchphrases go, it's no ?Hasta la vista, baby? ? hell, it's not even a ?Consider this a divorce? ? but it's been 10 years since the Terminator starred in a movie and we'll take what we can get.
In this violent modern Western, Arnold plays Sheriff Ray Owens, guardian of Sommerton Junction, a hamlet on the Arizona border that's just a corn field away from Mexico. (Casting a bodybuilder with an impenetrable Austrian accent as a small-town American sheriff seems like a stretch until you remember that in real life, Californian voters cast one as their governor.) As in every Schwarzenegger flick, the residents of Sommerton never quite seem to notice that Sheriff Ray is big, strong and scary. The mayor treats him like he's Paul Blart: Mall Cop and the waitress at the diner on Main Street pesters him at 4 am to ask why the milk man is late.
But Ray takes these insults in stride: he's old, and he doesn't care who knows it. As did Sylvester Stallone's Barney Ross in the first Expendables, he tempers expectations by being the first to declare ? repeatedly ? that his deltoids have seen better days, like he's a King Lear who's forced to kill. The world weariness plays better here, as unlike Stallone's paid mercenary, Sheriff Ray, an ex-LAPD narcotics officer, just wants to keep the peace. When he sighs, ?I've seen enough blood and death,? you believe him.
The set-up of Andrew Knauer's screenplay is classically simple: Three hundred and fifty miles away in Las Vegas, evil drug baron Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega of the Spanish twister Abre los Ojos) has…
Ashley Greene Ashley Olsen Ashley Scott Ashley Tappin Ashley Tisdale Asia Argento Aubrey ODay Audrina Patridge