10 / 10
Official trailer
A Man Who Doesn’t Care
Last Man Standing is one of my favorite movies, and the reason is John Smith. Bruce Willis plays a drifter heading for Mexico in an old car, running from something he never explains, and he rolls into Jericho, a dusty little border town that’s barely alive. Within minutes, a pair of thugs has wrecked his car, and he’s decided to stay a while.
Smith just doesn’t give a fuck about anything. He doesn’t care about the town, the law, the gangs or his own safety. He cares about money, a little, and about staying alive, sort of. He’ll shoot a man in the middle of a sentence and walk away without looking back. Willis plays him flat, dry and completely unbothered, and he’s never been better.
Walter Hill wrote and directed it, and it’s a Prohibition-era gangster version of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, the same story Sergio Leone turned into A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood. You can feel both of them behind every scene, and Hill makes it his own.
For Writers
John Smith doesn’t care about anything, and that’s what makes him magnetic. A hero with no stake in the outcome is free to do things nobody else would.
A protagonist who’s detached can be thrilling to watch, because the reader never knows what they’ll do next. They’re not bound by loyalty, morality or fear, so every scene carries a charge of unpredictability.
The trick is to give the detachment a history the reader can feel even if it’s never explained. Smith is running from something. We never learn what, and we don’t need to. The unexplained weight behind his indifference keeps him from being empty. Readers sense a wound, and a wound is enough. My article on character backstory goes further.
Two Gangs, One Town
Jericho is split between two gangs running bootleg liquor over the Mexican border.
Doyle, a cold, twitchy boss played by David Patrick Kelly, leads the Irish. Fredo Strozzi, who’s connected to the big Chicago mob, leads the Italians. The two sides hate each other, the town’s emptied out around them, and anybody left is caught in the crossfire.
Smith sees an opportunity. He hires himself out to one gang, then to the other, feeding each side lies about the other, collecting money from both and secretly setting them up to wipe each other out. He’s a one-man war, and he doesn’t much care who’s left standing, as long as it’s him.
The plan never quite goes the way he expects, and that’s where the film gets its tension. Every double-cross leaves a body, and every body brings the whole town closer to explosion. That escalation is my favorite thing about the plot. Smith thinks he’s running the game, the film keeps showing him he isn’t, and every time it does, the body count climbs and the town gets smaller.
Christopher Walken
Christopher Walken plays Hickey, Doyle’s enforcer, and few villains in Walken’s long career match him. Hickey is quiet, patient and utterly without pity. He carries a Tommy gun like it’s part of his arm, he talks in that strange, flat Walken rhythm, and he watches Smith from the first moment like a man who’s already worked out how he’s going to kill him.
Walken was perfect for the part. He doesn’t need to shout or threaten. He just looks at people, and they start sweating. The scenes where he and Willis size each other up crackle, because these are two professionals who recognize exactly what the other one is.
Their final showdown is the payoff the whole film builds toward, and when it comes, it’s short, brutal and exactly right. It’s worth every minute of the wait. Walken gets less screen time than I’d like, and every minute of it counts. Hickey is the villain I’d pick to show somebody what Walken can do, and the film is smart enough to keep him quiet and let the Tommy gun do the talking.
The Rest of the Town
Everybody else is perfect for the part too. Bruce Dern plays Ed Galt, the sheriff, a sour, corrupt old man who’s decided the smartest thing a lawman can do in Jericho is nothing. William Sanderson plays Joe Monday, the nervous innkeeper who runs the empty hotel where Smith stays, and he’s the closest thing Smith has to a friend.
Dern and Sanderson are the kind of character actors who make a town feel real. Every face in Jericho looks worn out, scared or bought, and the film never lets you forget that ordinary people are living in the middle of this war, trying not to get shot.
Joe Monday is more important than he first seems.
When Smith is caught and beaten half to death, it’s the frightened little innkeeper who helps him get out of town and heal. That small act of loyalty is repaid in the end. In a film full of men who’d sell anybody, it’s a quiet reminder that decency survives in odd places.
The Rangers
Midway through, the Texas Rangers ride into town.
Their captain gives both gangs an ultimatum and makes it clear the state is running out of patience with Jericho. Suddenly there’s a clock on everything. The gangs have to finish their business fast, and Smith has to finish his before the law finishes all of them.
It’s a terrific twist in the arc, and it’s one of the things Hill added to the old Yojimbo template. The outside world arrives, the stakes rise and the whole town tightens like a fist. From there, the film drives straight to its bloody end.
For Writers
The Texas Rangers arrive midway through and put a clock on everything. The story tightens because the outside world has finally run out of patience with Jericho.
A deadline can transform the second half of a story. When the characters suddenly have limited time, every choice becomes urgent, every delay becomes dangerous and the plot accelerates toward its climax.
If your middle section is sagging, look for an outside force that can arrive and set a deadline: a lawman, a storm, a creditor, a visitor. It doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to make everybody move faster, and make the reader feel the clock ticking. Hill’s Rangers barely appear, and they change everything.
Two Guns Blazing
The action in Last Man Standing is famous, and a little ridiculous. Smith fights with a pair of big Colt automatics, and when he shoots people, they fly backwards through doors, windows and walls, as if they’ve been hit by a truck. It’s not realistic. It’s glorious.
Hill stages the gunfights like something out of a comic book, loud, fast and bloody, with the big Colts booming like cannons. The body count is enormous. The shootouts in the hotel, the gang hideouts and the dusty streets are some of the most satisfying action of the nineties, and Willis handles the guns like he was born with them.
Those shootouts are the part I’d put on a loop. Nobody flies through a wall like a man hit by one of Smith’s Colts, and Hill knows it’s absurd and plays it dead straight anyway.
The Girl
The only part of the film I found a little unbelievable is Smith’s love for Felina, played by Karina Lombard. She’s a Mexican woman Doyle is keeping as a kind of prisoner, and Smith, the man who doesn’t care about anybody, suddenly risks everything to help her escape.
I know they had to add something in there.
A man with no heart at all is hard to root for across a whole movie, and the rescue gives Smith one decent act and gets him beaten nearly to death for it. But the romance is hokey. It doesn’t fit the cold, sardonic man Willis has been playing, and the film would have worked just as well without the moony looks.
It’s a small complaint, and it’s the only one I’ve got.
For Writers
Smith’s love for Felina doesn’t fit the man the film has shown us. It gives him a sympathetic act, and it feels added on.
When you give a cold character a moment of warmth, it has to grow out of who they are, or it’ll feel like the writer stepping in. A tiny gesture that fits the character beats a big romance that doesn’t.
Smith didn’t need to fall in love to help Felina. He could have done it out of spite toward Doyle, or boredom, or a flicker of decency he’d never admit to. Any of those would have kept him who he is, and the rescue would have landed harder for it.
Hill’s Style
Walter Hill made The Warriors, 48 Hrs. and Southern Comfort, and he’s always loved tough men, simple stories and violent, stylized action. Last Man Standing is the purest version of his style: a western dressed as a gangster film, shot in dusty golds and browns, with Willis narrating in a dry, weary voice.
The film originally had a score by Elmer Bernstein. It was dropped and replaced by a moody, twangy score from Ry Cooder. It suits the film perfectly, all slide guitar and dust, and it gives Jericho the feel of a ghost town waiting to happen. Swapping in Cooder was the right call. The slide guitar makes Jericho sound half-buried already, and I can’t picture the film without it.
A Flop in 1996
In 1996, Last Man Standing did badly at the box office. It cost a lot and made back far less, and critics were split. Audiences expected a Bruce Willis action movie like Die Hard, full of wisecracks and heroics, and got a cold, stylized story about a man with no morals and no jokes.
Their loss. It’s gained a big following since, from fans of westerns, gangster films and anybody who loves a good gunfight, and it deserves every bit of it. Watching it now, it looks like a film that was too cool for its moment.
A Perfect Arc
For me, it’s got the perfect movie arc. A stranger walks into a divided town, plays both sides, loses control, gets beaten down, comes back and burns the town down. Every character fits the story. Every scene pushes it forward. Bruce Willis was perfect for the part, Christopher Walken was perfect for the part and everybody around them was perfect for their parts.
The love story’s a little hokey. Everything else is exactly right.
Craft Note
Craft Note
This picture takes one of the cleanest story shapes in cinema, a stranger playing two sides against each other, and runs it with a hero who doesn’t care about anything. The indifference makes the plan exciting, because nothing and nobody is safe.
A borrowed structure can still feel fresh if the character driving it’s vivid. Hill’s version of Yojimbo works because John Smith is his own man and owes little to Mifune or Eastwood.
If you’re borrowing a classic plot, spend your energy on the character at its center. Make them specific enough that the old story feels new.
The Stranger Who Burned Down Jericho
I give Last Man Standing a 10, and it’s one of my favorite movies: Bruce Willis’s John Smith, a man who doesn’t give a fuck about anything, Christopher Walken’s terrifying Hickey, two gangs caught in a crossfire, the Rangers riding in and a perfect movie arc. The love story’s a little hokey. Nothing else is.
