The following review contains spoilers! An interesting idea is put through the Western wringer and comes out soaked in blood. A band of outlaws barely escape after a muddled bank robbery attempt. They kill their leader Graff (Mickey Rourke), and continue on. Graff lives, and joins the very posse hunting down the robbers. He takes his bloody revenge on his old gang one by one, until just his former second-in-command Eustis (Dermot Mulroney) is left. What a great idea. Reading the back of the video box, I thought this would really play with your mind. Then I watched the movie.
Rourke, thanks to his facial hair scheme and boxer's eyes, looks like an Old West version of Fu Manchu. His Southern accent is constantly dubbed in, since he mutters through this more than Marlon Brando in the last half of his career. Rourke plays Graff as a psychotic but it takes the rest of the posse forever to discover this trait as he gets most of them killed. There are no smart scenes where the posse does not know he is the gang leader. Instead, after killing the marshal (Gavan O'Herlihy) and the bank president (Richard Fancy), he is made head of the posse, since the other posse members are too stupid to see his murderous ways. Mulroney is good here, he plays Eustis a little too sensitively, but he is a likable hero. Ted Levine is also good as Potts, a shoot-now-ask-later moron who is with the gang. The robbers are nothing more than stereotypes. Eustis is the good guy. Potts is dumb. Wills (John C. McGinley) is the coward. Lovecraft (Keith David) practices voodoo and is convinced Graff is a ghost. Steve Buscemi is Philo the dreamer, who is talking about his little home on the beach in Mexico he hopes to have one day right before having his head blown off. Loomis (Daniel Quinn) is the injured guy they will eventually sacrifice. The posse's marshal is a he-man who is killed way too early. The bank president is nerdy and bespectacled, and also killed in an outlandish way. The constant blood and shootings are exhausting. The whole film is just a bunch of guys riding around in the desert getting shot. The opening bank robbery, reminiscent of "The Wild Bunch," is handled well enough, but screenwriter Eric Red never gives us any characters, just warm bodies full of blood. Why does this robbery go wrong after 29 went right? Why does Graff pick this robbery to go mental and get "killed" by his own men? How did the posse know the bank was going to be robbed? After the opening credits, you feel like you just walked into the middle of the film, not the beginning. These professional bank robbers and cold-blooded posse members also spend most of the film fighting amongst themselves, and bickering in a way that made me think of my child's preschool class. The final mistake here is having Eustis narrate the film. Since Eric Red is no Billy Wilder and this isn't "Sunset Blvd.," Eustis obviously lives through the film, meaning he probably defeats Graff in the finale. I sat through 90 minutes of bloodshed to witness a showdown that I had already figured out in the first ten minutes. While not an utter failure, "The Last Outlaw" does not have enough going for it to be recommended.
