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Review: The Last Boy Scout (1991)
Bruce Willis is a private investigator whose latest case might well be his last one and it is not because of his big-budgeted box office bomb Hudson Hawk. However, that might not exactly make for a bad guess. Tony Scott, brother of director Ridley Scott (Thelma and Louise), and himself a director of such offerings as Top Gun and last year’s Days of Thunder brings some zing to the latest from ace action producer Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Predator, and their sequels). The Last Boy Scout plays like a lengthy episode of “The Rockford Files” but with a generous amount of violence and rough language—and no commercial breaks.
Joe Hallenbeck (Willis) does not exactly live a charmed life. His daughter (Danielle Harris) has been acting up in school and things are not going well with the wife (Chelsea Field). Joe, however, is only just a tad p.o.ed to find that she has been getting intimate with a p.i. who just so happens to be one his pals (Bruce McGill); Joe thanks his friend with a solid slug to his gut. Joe’s pal offers him a job that he has passed on; but the pal is paid in full when both he and his car are blown to kingdom come.
When Joe’s wife asks him who was responsible for the explosion he quips, “Mr. Rogers,” Joe does not even show any real outrage over his friend’s death.The private investigator’s newest assignment: guarding an exotic dancer with quite a body (lovely Halle Berry of Kevin Hooks Strictly Business and Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever). The dancer’s boyfriend Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans of “In Living Color”) a former pro football star—like Hallenbeck, he too has fallen from grace; and is not at all keen on Hallenbeck being her protector.
The assignment is brief as she is brutally slain by a posse of pistol-packing punks. Shortly thereafter, the two reluctantly team up to find the killers’ colleagues. Their endeavors find them up against a sinister fat cat who is basically a refashioning of John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown (Noble Willingham, recently seen as Jennifer Connelly’s father in Career Opportunities, the rancher in City Slickers, and was among the supporting cast of the famed Roman Polanksi 1974 classic).
Shane Black, screenwriter of Lethal Weapon, scripted this effort (from a story by him and Greg Hicks) that pales in comparison to such other prior Silver efforts as Lethal Weapon and Die Hard. Joe Santos, Lt. Becker of “The Rockford Files,” here plays a curmedgeon of a cop often on Hallenbeck’s case while the investigator is working on one.
The Last Boy Scout is not as well-crafted as such prior formentioned Silver efforts. It is far superior to the Patrick Swayze 1989 actioner Roadhouse. Still director Scott keep the pace rolling. Despite the overabundance of expletives, gunplay, and some violence which is rather graphic, it is nowhere near as much of an exercise in excess as Scott’s Beverly Hills Cop II nor is it the virtually non-stop downer which his last picture was: the Kevin Costner vehicle Revenge.
Robert Baum is Currently a Bryn Mawr, PA-based film afficanado and pop culture junkie.
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