Action man back with bang

It’s as gruffly confident as might be expected, and yet it raises two awkward questions: is this still Arnold’s town, and is his watch still ticking?

Almost a decade has passed since the 65-year-old bodybuilder-turnedavatar of the American Dream last anchored a film, and The Last Stand’s box office postings suggest that the answer to these questions is "no”.

Schwarzenegger’s action-western hybrid made $6.3-million (about R56-million) in the US on its opening weekend: a far cry from the $44-million (R388-million) debut for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003, his last feature before serving two terms as governor of California. Happily, The Last Stand is a zippier, zestier film than both Terminator 3 and its own hackneyed premise suggest.

For this we can probably thank its Korean director, Kim Jee-woon, who, having crafted an Eastern Western in The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008), is now revisiting the most American of all genres on its home turf.

Schwarzenegger plays Ray Owens, the sheriff of a sleepy border town through which an absconded cartel boss (Eduardo Noriega) plans to make his escape to Mexico.

Between him and freedom – the bad, Mexican kind – stand Owens, his cowpoke deputies (Luis Guzmán, Jaimie Alexander, Zach Gilford) and a local gun nut called Dinkum (the Jackass star Johnny Knoxville), who has stockpiled a comprehensive range of armaments in an enormous metal shed. Big Law Enforcement, led by FBI agent John Bannister (Forest Whitaker), are no help whatsoever.

There is a survivalist ethos at The Last Stand’s heart that might have been lifted from a National Rifle Association pamphlet: when trouble comes calling, Dinkum’s wildly paranoiac hoarding proves to have in fact been very sensible, and his arsenal (which includes that trusty western staple, a Gatling gun) is put to good use.

This is a truer reflection of the proclivities of the American gun lobby than, say, the stylised violence of Quentin Tarantino, although to penalise The Last Stand on those grounds would mean reappraising every dumb Hollywood action flick made between 1982 and 1999.

Accept it instead for what it is: a fun mulch of car chases, gunplay and deadpan one-liners, which ends, perhaps tellingly, in a giant field of maize. In Schwarzenegger’s America, there is still corn as far as the eye can see. – The Daily Telegraph