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The Last Stand | 2013 | R | - 2.8.7
An aging small town sheriff (Arnold Schwarzenegger) takes on a wave of Mexican bandits and drug runners, while an escaped drug kingpin leads the sheriff on a chase in a supercharged car. Also with Johnny Knoxville, Forest Whitaker, Rodrigo Santoro, Zach Gilford, Genesis Rodriguez, Jaimie Alexander, Luis Guzmán, Peter Stormare, Eduardo Noriega and Harry Dean Stanton. Directed by Kim Ji-woon. [1:47]
SEX/NUDITY 2 - A man and a woman kiss for several seconds in a stairwell. A man and a woman kiss in a racecar while the man is driving and the man touches her chest before throwing her out of the car while it is still moving; she rolls and is unharmed.
► In a bedroom scene, a man gets out of bed wearing a T-shirt; on the far side of the bed, we see the back of a sleeping person wearing pajamas (the gender is not obvious).
► Several men whistle and catcall at a female pedestrian in a short skirt in a small town. In a brief scene, a billboard painting in Las Vegas depicts an indistinct line of showgirls dancing with bare thighs, wearing short-sleeved blouses and very short skirts. A man appears shirtless (he has tattoos at the sides of his waist); another man wears tattoos of designs and numbers on both biceps and forearms.
VIOLENCE/GORE 8 - Gun violence is present throughout the film with the use of handguns and rifles by law enforcement personnel and Mexican drug dealers near the US-Mexico Border; other weapons fired often include military assault rifles, bazookas, missile launchers and a WWII Gatling gun, and dozens of police vehicles are destroyed, especially with flying glass from shot-out windshields and several street shootouts include broken store windows and door glass panels.
► A criminal commandeers an empty school bus and attempts to drive over deputies in a street unsuccessfully; a sheriff slides under the bus to pick up a gun, shoots through the bus floor and the criminal laughs, a second shot through the floor goes through the top side of the man's head and he screams in pain as the sheriff climbs onto the bus and the criminal attempts to shoot him but the sheriff shoots him between the eyes with a lot of blood spurting out the back of the head and down the face.
► Two deputies find criminals in a field by a canyon late at night and a shootout ends with one deputy wounded in the abdomen and losing a lot of blood while the other deputy hides behind her vehicle and shoots at the criminals until the sheriff arrives and shoots and kills several of them (we see a lot of blood on chest and head wounds); the female deputy applies pressure to the male deputy's wound while on the way to the hospital, but he dies (her hands are covered in his blood) and a bazooka is fired at an empty police car and sends it into the air in a huge ball of fire and smoke.
► A man confronts a farmer in his field on a tractor, they argue briefly and the farmer fires a rifle between the man's feet to raise a cloud of dirt; the man walks off screen as the farmer pulls a shotgun and shoots the man in the head (we see blood spray).
► A dozen shootout scenes occur between Mexican drug runners and American law enforcement agents from the FBI, SWAT teams, military units and a small town Sheriff's Department: In two scenes, FBI men are shot in the head at close range (blood spurts from their necks and heads) and in another scene, a running SWAT member receives a shot to the head that results in a red mist to spray in the wind.
► A chained-up man breaks loose from an FBI transfer when the van he is in is lifted to a rooftop by a crane and a magnet, and the man fights two officers inside the van, killing them both with neck breaks and pushing one out of a door to smash onto a car below; assassins and FBI agents shoot at one another and several men fall in the street, presumably dead (a dozen decoys of the convict are released and agents chase and subdue them, but afterward they realize they've been duped them).
► Dozens of police and FBI vehicles chase a man driving a very fast car: in one scene at a police roadblock, criminals appear in two SUVs, lean out the windows and fire automatic rifles at the policemen, felling all of them in a long shot; a large snow plow charges through the police vehicles and clears the way as a car races through the scene, an FBI helicopter chases the car, but the driver switches on a cloaking device and loses the chopper. At a roadblock, criminals fire automatic weapons at a dozen officers and kill all of them as they scatter to hide behind vehicles (we see the officers lying on the pavement and in a nearby field, but cannot see any blood).
► Deputies shoot at a car racing in their town and miss when the sheriff commandeers a high-speed vehicle and chases the first car ending up in a cornfield where the cars hit each other several times while driving through tall corn plants, the first driver falls out of his car, dazed after crashing into farm equipment, runs to a bridge and fights with the sheriff and many bloody wounds occur from knife slashes; the sheriff tackles the man twice and gouges his eye deeply, the sheriff pounds the man's head and shoulders into the bridge girders, pulls a short knife from his thigh and stabs it into the man's leg, resulting in bleeding and a scream, and the man is arrested.
► Criminals and deputies fire weapons at one another from street level and from rooftops after a sheriff pulls up to a road block in an SUV and another man drives an empty school bus onto a main street: from inside the bus, two men fire a machine gun, mowing down men as blood spurts from wounds, a man falls dead from a rooftop as we hear a thud on the street, and inside a building two men and a deputy shoot at each other and one man dies from several bloody chest wounds and slides down an entire staircase; the other man falls dead at the top of the stairs, with a little blood on his chest and face and outside another deputy is shot in the shoulder and he falls (later we see him walking).
► A sheriff and four deputies load a large truck and SUVs with weapons and take them to a main street in a town where they have parked civilian vehicles to block the street; a deputy hides behind the blockade and fires at men as they approach, he is wounded (we see him fall and we later see him in an ambulance and we hear that it is a 50 caliber wound), and a man fires a rocket into a car and it explodes in flames and smoke (no one is harmed).
► An elderly woman uses a rifle to shoot an intruder into her shop, sending him falling through her front display window; glass breaks and we see some blood and she walks outside and tells the sheriff to "put a hurt on them."
► A man dives into a diner through the front door, breaking glass, stands up and pulls a glass shard from his bloody thigh. A man suffers cuts in a fist fight, where his legs are slashed with a knife several times and a man stabs him in the thigh with a knife; we also see cuts to his face from broken windshield glass, suffered earlier.
► Two deputies find a man dead in a closet at home with a small wound on his cheek the only sign of injury. Two deputies find a tractor with bloodstains on it and a pool of blood on grass beside it.
► A man wrecks his car after another car chases him through cornrows and he hits a parked harvester and smashes the vehicle; he rolls out of the open driver's side door, dazed and with a spot of blood on his cheek. A man driving a car slows at a crossroad, touches a woman's chest, kisses her and throws her out of the car while still moving; she rolls and is unharmed. Throughout the film, a former racecar driver performs dangerous stunts with a powerful car; he drives over and under SUVs on the highway, forcing them off the road, he smashes through roadblocks and smashes police cruisers, he drives thorough a cornfield in several directions, drives without lights at night, and drives at high speeds on farm roads and highways.
► Three men practice shooting at a new firing range, shooting handguns at a side of beef hanging outdoors against the building: meat splatters on the wall and one man falls down from handgun recoil and suffers a bloody nose; a fourth man drives up, picks up a large silver handgun and points it at the camera, about to shoot the beef. A shooter's club is shown full of a wide range of handguns, rifles, bazookas, grenade and missile launchers, swords and all types of munitions.
► An agent in an FBI operation apprehends an agent that spied on the operation for a drug lord, arrests her and shoves her into a police van with the drug lord. An FBI agent pounds tables, kicks chairs and curses in several scenes.
► A drug lord calls an FBI agent, tells him that another agent is a hostage and that he will cut her into 100 pieces and mail each one separately to the FBI if he is not left alone. A man tells a woman that his niece met him in the kitchen of their home one night with a Glock pistol, ready to splatter his brains on the wall, but he killed her first (he does not say how). Bloody tissues sit on a sheriff's desk and he says to a deputy, "I've seen enough blood and death; I know what's coming" referring to drug traffickers coming through town. We hear that a former LAPD officer successfully stopped a large shipment of illegal drugs, suffering five wounds, while seven other officers were killed (please see the Substance Use category for more details). We hear that a former Sheriff's deputy served in Iraq and saw the deaths of soldiers on both sides.
LANGUAGE 7 - About 22 F-words and its derivatives, 19 scatological terms, 4 anatomical references, 20 mild obscenities, exclamations (shut up), name-calling (crazy, schmuck), stereotypical references to senior citizens, women, small towns, Hispanics, drug dealers, inept police forces, FBI agents, gun collectors, immigrants, Arizona border fights, 2 religious profanities, 5 religious exclamations.
SUBSTANCE USE - Two older men drink bottles of beer at a restaurant counter with their breakfast in two scenes (one of the men has a smoking cigarette in an ashtray beside him) and a man drinks from a bottle of beer while sitting on his porch at night. We hear that an LAPD officer helped to stop a 5-ton shipment of illegal drugs from reaching its destination (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details).
DISCUSSION TOPICS - Illegal drugs, Mexican drug cartels, Arizona border violence, immigration, automatic weapons, abilities of senior citizens, courage, enforcing drug and immigration laws, hazardous driving.
MESSAGE - Drug cartels can be stopped with lots of shootouts.
CAVEATS
Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.
We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.
Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.
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