Last Man Standing

Updated June 26, 2020 | Infoplease Staff
Director/Writer:Walter Hill
Director of Photography:Lloyd Ahern
Editor:Freeman Davies
Music:Ry Cooder
Production Designer:Gary Wissner
Producers:Walter Hill and Arthur Sarkissian
New Line; R; 102 minutes
Release:9/96
Cast:Bruce Willis, Bruce Dern, Christopher Walken, Michael Imperioli, David Patrick Kelly, Alexandra Powers, Karina Lombard and Leslie Mann
Based on the film Yojimbo

Hill's remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo ignores some of the original characteristics that made the film a classic. Kurosawa's unnamed hero would never vocalize his thought process as John Smith (Willis) does in the opening scene. Hill tried to capture the nihilism of the original, but in doing so, the characters turn off-puttingly brooding and reserved when they're not blowing away everyone in sight. Smith arrives in the Texas border town Jericho, hired as a mercenary by rival bootlegging, Chicago-based mobsters to protect the thugs from each other. He compromises his position as independent gun-for-hire when he falls for one of the gang's enslaved women (Lombard). An ultraviolent bloodbath that fails to evoke any emotion or sympathy.


.com/ipea/0/1/6/1/0/1/A0161018.html
Sources +