Director Walter Hill’s Prohibition-era gangster take on Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (though perhaps influenced more by Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western version, A Fistful of Dollars) is a down n’ dirty, lean n’ mean mobster tale starring Bruce Willis as an ever-scowling gun-for-hire who wanders into a turf war between Irish and Italian bootleggers in the middle of the Texas desert. This wandering “John Smith” (rather than “The Man With No Name”) manages to get hired by both sides… and proceeds to manipulate a series of events that will lead to them wiping each other out. An exciting, ultraviolent piece of pulp fiction, Last Man Standing features an intense performance by Willis, an amusingly scary one by Christopher Walken as the Irish team’s top gun and a wonderfully over-the-top one by David Patrick Kelly as the Irish boss. Alexandra Powers is the only woman in sight, and she does what most women do in Walter Hill movies — get seduced and slapped around. Lock and load and relish this flick in all its tasteless excess.
