Bear with us for just a moment: Walter Hill's Last Man Standing, a brooding frontier tale about violent bootleggers, corrupt lawmen and gun-toting heroes, is a new version of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (a brooding frontier tale about ambitious crime lords, corrupt lawmen and knife-wielding samurai), a film that was previously remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (a dark, brooding frontier tale about violent cowboys, corrupt lawmen and and gun-toting heroes).
To complicate things even further we must point out that Kurosawa based his original masterpiece on Dashiell Hammett's crime classic Red Harvest, a book that was never literally filmed as Hammett wrote it but has inspired movies as diverse as Miller's Crossing (The Coen Brothers) and High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood).
Walter Hill seems quite conscious of his film's numerous predecessors and clearly opted for the potpourri approach. Last Man Standing is an amalgam of all previous variations on the Red Harvest-plot, and plays as a western, a samurai drama and a gangster flick all at once.
Bruce Willis is a depressed stranger who wanders into a depressing town where rival gangs of bootleggers are involved in an all-out war. Since Bruce has no morals at all (or so it seems) he decides to make an easy buck by exploiting the trust of both gangs and selling his guns to the highest bidder. As soon as Bruce has played out his scheme we'll know who'll be the last man standing. Walter Hill has turned this existential theme of a soulless man and his love affair with murder and mayhem into a postmodern pastiche that pays hommage to great screen legends like Sam Peckinpah, Howard Hawks, Clint Eastwood and John Woo.
His movie isn't as tight as Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars but there's a lot to recommend it. The action sequences are pretty astounding with Hill and cinematographer Lloyd Ahern doing one better than John Woo's trademark 'ballets of blood'. The cast is fine too with Bruce Willis playing it cool and adding another layer to his already well-established tough guy persona.
It's Christopher Walken, however, who walks away with the picture as the whispering gangster who's more lethal than an entire army of gang-bangers. Last Man Standing is not the seminal Hammett adaptation that it could have been, but it's still a darn entertaining rip-off of movies we can't wait to see again.
