In short: Last Looks (2021)

Former cop with a conscience – therefore the “former” - Charlie Waldo (Charlie “Yawn” Hunnam) is roped back into the crime solving life when his ex-wife Lorena (Morena Baccarin) disappears just after trying to convince him to help her exonerate British ham actor Alastair Pinch (Mel Gibson) for the murder of his wife. All, so that Shakespearean Pinch can continue his work playing a Southern judge on TV. Charlie’s soon up to his neck (and repeatedly knocked out, as is the tradition) in the case. This also involves a sexy kindergarten teacher (Lucy Fry), a producer with a particularly weird looking head (Rupert Friend), a drug dealer who wants his “mem” (Jacob Scipio), and several old enemies from the police force (among them Clancy Brown).

It might have been better if our protagonist had stayed in his trailer in the woods.

It’s pretty obvious that Tim Kirkby’s movie really, really wants to be a throwback to idiosyncratic 70s private eye movies, aka a kind of movie I like rather a lot. Alas, it suffers from various problems that get in the way of these ambitions again and again.

For one, Kirkby’s personality-free direction is as far from Robert Altman – or Peter Hyams, for that matter – as you can get while still making movies in this particular niche of the genre. Then, Charlie Hunnam most certainly is no Elliott Gould (or Walter Matthau, or James Garner, etc), but in fact still one of the most boring and personality-free actors to put on a stupid beard and not emote into a camera you can encounter. Though, to be fair, the only actors on screen here who seem to have come awake and willing to put even a minimum amount of work in are Fry, Gibson (whose acting has improved as much as his private personality has gotten worse over the years, ironically enough) and Brown. Everybody else seems to suffer from a bad case of “what the hell am I doing here”, or, as in our lead’s case, have never been terribly good to begin with.

The script – by sitcom writer/producer Howard Michael Gould, apparently adapting his own novel, badly, unless it’s a bad novel – meanders from one scene to the next, going through jokes bad, tired, and seldom surprisingly funny, while never getting the point of why those 70s crime movies were strangely paced and meandering, or what would be needed to get away with this today.