The Last Stand

last updated 8 January 2015

Directed by Kim Jee-woon

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new movie is “dumb fun, emphasis on the dumb,” said Connie Ogle in The Miami Herald. But if you’re “interested enough to pay for a ticket,” chances are you’ll be “moderately diverted for a while” by this ludicrous tale about the sheriff of an Arizona border town who must stop a fleeing Mexican drug lord from outrunning U.S. authorities. “If anything,” Schwarzenegger’s acting has gotten worse since he took a screen sabbatical to serve two terms as California’s governor, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. But the 65-year-old former bodybuilder “has always had a genial arrogance that audiences eat up,” and that playfulness is on full display here, even if he doesn’t move or look as good as he used to. “There are a few laughs along the way,” as well as some “heart-pounding car chases,” said Stephanie Merry in The Washington Post. Let’s not pretend it’s all good fun, though. This is a movie bent on engineering for its villains violent demises of a kind “that elicit an ‘ohhhh!’ or maybe an ‘ewwww!’ from the audience.” That’s worse than mindless.