The Last Boy Scout (1991)

Once, Joe Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis) was a secret service agent who took a bullet for the president. Today, he’s a washed-up, alcoholic private eye with a marriage on the rocks, a mad-on for the senator who fired him, and a love for potty-mouthed witticisms minus the wit, because this was written by Shane Black. The plot will throw him together with younger, yet still washed-up, former American Football pro Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans), who shares his love for talking crap, if little else. When they are not flirting with each other and verbally comparing their dick sizes, they are set against a really complicated plot to legalize gambling with the help of a little assassination and a bit of the old ultra violence that doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Which honestly is not much of a problem for this Tony Scott directed big, loud, expensive US mainstream action buddy movie, because nobody expects the evil plans in a film like it to be probable or believable. As long as an evil plot is fun and a helpful framework to hang various action sequences on, it’s all good in this genre. In this particular case, more sensible villains with a sensible plot would just not fit scenes like the one in the finale where Wayans, riding through a football stadium on horseback, throws a ball to catch a bullet meant for the assassination target (who, dramatic irony alarm, is the guy responsible for Hallenbeck being fired from his old Secret Service job). And really, who’d want to miss out on that?

I’m actually a bit surprised how much I wouldn’t have wanted to miss anything happening in the film, seeing that I usually have quite a few problems with its director and often at least some problems with its main scriptwriter. Both men, though pretty maligned by quite a few people at their height, are by now highly beloved by a certain type of middle-aged, male American nerd movie critic (all things that apply to me too, apart from the being American thing), often to my bewilderment. Scott to me always was the prime example of a director with obvious technical chops who tended to put these chops in service of not very much – well, there was that one time when he made a feature-length ad for the US Airforce, but that’s not the thing to endear anyone to me, either. To my eyes, Scott mostly made films in genres I usually enjoy that slicked away all the rough edges, the grit and the strangeness I love about these genres, leaving something that feels much more like “product” than any Marvel movie I’ve seen.

And Shane Black? Can write a good one-liner, sometimes even a dozen, but can just as often annoy me endlessly with his fixation on male asshole characters he clearly admires for being violent pieces of shit and therefore mostly never allows to truly change or learn from their experiences (at their core, his assholes are always right), sprinkled with a bit of casual misogyny, the kind of lame cynicism most of us grow out of once we get into our twenties, and the belief that having characters say fuck (etc) a lot makes your writing somehow “edgy” instead of going for the most obvious, and least shocking, kind of shock value. To be fair, if we ignore The Predator, he is genuinely great at plotting abstruse narratives with great conviction, has quite the hand for pacing, and more often than not manages to deliver a script that still makes for a fun (sometimes even good or great) movie.

Truthfully, all these criticism can be applied to The Last Boy Scout too, but through some weird kind of alchemy, the combination of Scott’s soulless slickness and Black’s try-hard yet certainly not soulless edginess somehow turns all the flaws into sources of great fun, an amusement ride of a movie that uses its director’s and writer’s respective shticks (and tics), and a metric fuckton (to keep in the vernacular) of explosions, to bludgeon all the critical faculties of a viewer’s brain into blissful submission.


Is it a good movie? Well, it’s certainly one made with the highest level of craftsmanship, diving joyfully into all sorts of excess, and featuring a whole lot of awesome violence, so definitely yes.