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The Last Boy Scout
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Action
107 minutes ‧ R ‧ 1991
Roger Ebert
December 13, 1991
4 min read
“The Last Boy Scout” opens with a sequence of such sudden and unexpected violence that the audience is stunned into uneasy silence.
The movie never looks back. Perhaps propelled by the determination of its star, Bruce Willis, to erase the box-office curse of “Hudson Hawk,” this film panders with such determination to the base instincts of the action crowd that it will, I am sure, be an enormous hit.
It was produced by Joel Silver, who has made violence toward women a key element in his films, and cheerfully expands its horizons to violence toward children – providing the Willis character with a foul-mouthed 13-year-old daughter who is hauled around by bad guys with a gun pointed at her temple. (The film is rated R, proving that violence alone cannot earn the NC-17 rating.) It is some kind of a tribute to Tony Scott, who directed the film, and especially to Shane Black and Greg Hicks, who wrote the screenplay, that this material survives its own complete cynicism and somehow actually works. Watching it, I felt like some weatherbeaten innocent from an earlier, simpler time. My distaste was irrelevant.
This movie is the future. It assumes the average audience now has no standards except those of the mob.
The only consistent theme of the film is its hatred of women. The two heroes (Willis and Damon Wayans) have a wife and a girlfriend, respectively, who cheat on them – the wife with Willis’ best friend, the girlfriend by prostituting herself. Both men are at home in this screenplay, which hates women with a particular viciousness; the verbal violence begins by calling them bitches and whores and worse, over and over again, and the message is that a man can only really trust another man.
It is some kind of a tribute to Tony Scott, who directed the film, and especially to Shane Black and Greg Hicks, who wrote the screenplay, that this material survives its own complete cynicism and somehow actually works. Watching it, I felt like some weatherbeaten innocent from an earlier, simpler time. My distaste was irrelevant.
This movie is the future. It assumes the average audience now has no standards except those of the mob.
just rewatched The Last Boy Scout, a movie i cannot analyze objectively because i have loved it since childhood. But goddamn Ebert's review of it is both hard as fuck and prescient.