The Last Boy Scout
This is so full of different talents, it could have been ruined, like a pair of Levi’s being torn apart by horses. But it’s more like a stagecoach, all the horses are pulling in the same direction, towards the modern upbeat film noir.
It’s hard to beat this: Tony Scott in the director’s chair (produced by Joel Silver), with a script with trademark Shane Black quips, with Bruce Willis going all in on the grunge and Damon Wayans as the side kick. The side characters are chock full of familiar faces. This is almost as good as The Nice Guys, but you can’t beat those titanic leads.
The big plot is extremely topical too, but we are now in the second phase. It’s all about sports gambling, how it ruins everything, but the legalised sports gambling already came and went. We are now back into free for all territory with Kalshi and Polymarket, it’s back to the mobsters! Billions of 90’s dollars mean trillions now, but no senators had to die, except of old age.
The opening scene is closer to Rollerball, Death Race, or the 1984 Apple commercial. Some players is being pressured to win the game since much money is on the line. He risks CTE and takes drugs, but to make sure he can overpower his attackers, he pulls a piece on the field, and shoots every single motherfucker of them in his line of sight, before going out in infamy. He doesn’t even score a touchdown.
We meet our protagonist sleeping in his car, so drunk he doesn’t notice some kids throwing a dead rat into his face. He gets home and finds his wife cheating on him with his best friend, who wanted talk shop. He still gives him the job, before his car blows up.
He still takes the job, protecting some stripper, I mean, exotic dancer. She is already being protected by a washout football player. Sadly, they are not dealing with morons here, she is brutally murdered by gangsters in a Citroën DS.
The police chief knows he is being bullshitted by our protagonist but has to let him go, they got nothing. Our protagonists are more than they seem.
The ex-footballer was married with a kid, and they both died in a car crash. The private dick was a secret service dude that took a bullet for Jimmy Carter, before doing security for a senator who liked to go Fifty Shades of Grey on unconsenting females. The senator got his front teeth knocked out, and our protagonist got fired.
Besides work, his family is also a mess. The aforementioned cheating wife is all over him, since he barely sleeps at home and she was lonely, but his kid is also sassy like her father. They get home and the kid is watching the torture scene from Lethal Weapon, but she starts telling him off right away, calling him a loser idiot fuckup. Having a famous football player in tow doesn’t matter a bit, until she corners him in the end and asks for an autograph.
The investigation went well, they found the blackmail material the dead girl had on the LA team owner. He was threatening the senator about legalising sports gambling, since making young gladiators killing themselves on the pitch is not cutting it anymore. She wanted her boyfriend to be readmitted into the NFL. Of course, that evidence goes up in smoke when they have a close encounter with some goons.
The final goon in the worst though, Milo is a sophisticated dude that keeps calling our protagonists Joseph and James. He is truly sadistic, since he uses a switchblade. The bad guys can kill two birds with one stone by framing our protagonist for the senator’s murder, since he refused a bribe before and wants more money.
Our protagonists keep escaping from crazy situations, and the climax is a smaller version of Sudden Death, but rest assured the kid is kidnapped but our dudes save the day.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.