| Last Man Standing (1995) Cast:Jeff Wincott,Jillian McWhirter,Jonathan Fuller,Jonathan Banks I really don't understand how one stiff actor such as Wincott can still chuck the odds on one movie and still turn out to make a movie well worth watching, I swear with the exception of say, Dale Apollo Cook, every actionstar no matter how low down the food-chain still manages to make an actioner which not only entertains but thoroughly kicks ass, with Last Man Standing Wincott turns in his best work to date (Admittedly not saying much.) Before I go on talking about how enjoyable this one is, let me say first off that the PM group are like the the Go-Go boys of the 80's (Cannon's Golan and Globus) because they try extremely hard to make an actioner so ambitious and over the top that one is often astonished by one of their best efforts, and while this is slightly inferior to C. Thomas Howell's energetic The Sweeper, this author was still quite impressed with this nifty little effort which has excellently staged actionscenes as well as a surprisingly good performance from the love interest in the actioner, usually this is the most thankless part, but McWhirter is so good in the role and likable that her and Wincott make quite an engaging pair. Indeed even her love-scene with Wincott comes off as strangely erotic rather then just cheap exploitation. Last Man Standing however is just an excellent B. movie with enough dumb action and smart plot threads to rank as high octane fun, PM's trademark is to throw in as many car-chases and carnage in the mix and tie it all together, not all the time does it work, as Land Of The Free showed, not only is Last Man Standing vastly superior in terms of excitement, Last Man Standing has suspense, a decent script and characters we care about. When an actioner is successful in delivering all of these things, we swallow the things that would normally cause us to groan and we become engrossed when normally we'd just be watching the bodycount. Last Man Standing does this and remains an experience worth having... D.Joeseph Merhi ***1/2 |