Sometimes movies can be a lot like jigsaw puzzles. You dump everything out on the table, you start sorting your pieces, and as they fall into place, the bigger picture becomes clear (or, if you’re like me, you give up after half an hour, put all the pieces back in the box, and wonder why you didn’t just buy a picture of the thing in the first place). And I’m not talking just mysteries either; sure, there is almost always a “pieces in place” moment in a good whodunnit, but it doesn’t always have to be one for the same sort of mechanic to apply.
The Last Stop in Yuma County (streaming on Paramount+) is kind of like that jigsaw puzzle. A late fuel truck to a dry gas station on a deserted highway. The waitress opening the adjacent diner and running the place on her own. Stranded travelers heading in one by one and waiting for the truck to arrive because the next gas station is a hundred miles away and they won’t make it. The kitchen knife salesman on the way to see his estranged daughter. The road tripping elderly couple whose gauge is on E. The local stopping into the diner for a quick bite to eat. The young, naive deputy picking up coffees for the sheriff, who happens to be the waitress’s husband. A pair of Bonnie and Clyde wannabes aimlessly wandering. And the bank robbers, escaping from hot pursuit with their ill-gotten gains in tow. Don’t want to forget them. Quite the important puzzle piece they’ll turn out to be.
So, all for the want of a horseshoe nail, these folks are stranded in a diner, next to a gas station that has no gas, drinking coffee in the presence of two criminals, one hardened and one jumpy, but both violent and both armed. Nowhere to go, no reasonable way to stay. It’s more than a jigsaw puzzle, it’s more than bowling pins that need to be knocked down, it’s a powder keg waiting for a spark. It’s funny, though. And I don’t mean funny odd, I mean funny ha-ha. I mean I laughed out loud a few times during the movie, which was surprisingly uncomfortable, but in a way that I felt lacked purpose. It’s one part comedy and one part Shakespearean tragedy, with violence erupting suddenly and unexpectedly, leading to tonal inconsistencies that left me feeling pretty cold towards the movie. There’s something to be said about a mix of comedy and violence, just as there is comedy and horror, but it has to be balanced right and I didn’t feel that Last Stop got the balance quite right.
As the stage is littered Hamlet-style with the bodies of the innocent and guilty alike, I found myself wondering what the point of it all was. Is Last Stop a poignant portrait of the cost of ceaseless violence? Is it a criticism of the passionate and compassionless pursuit of ultracapitalistic gains? Is it just a snapshot of the very worst day in the lives of random people, where the pointless toiling of everyday existence is punctuated with irreversible tragedy? Normally, I praise movies that don’t waste your time with bloated lengths, but in this instance the 90 minutes felt sparse and lacking context. Character motivations are thin, characterizations lack depth, and many of the characters felt a little off the rack. I want to tell you more about them, I want to tell you who I connected with, who made me feel something, who made angry, who made me hopeful; but I didn’t get any of that. Characters barely have names, let alone personalities (the arguable main character, played by Simon Tam lookalike Jim Cummings (The Wolf of Snow Hollow) is simply credited as “Knife Salesman”. None of the names of the characters stuck with me, leading me to refer to them only with shorthand signifiers in my notes. “Salesman”, “waitress”, “Guy from Reservation Dogs”, “Joe Chill” (from Batman Begins), “Sierra McCormick” (that’s her actual name; underutilized here, but excellent in the Prime original film Vast of the Night), Faizon Love (Elf, The Parent ‘Hood), “probably racist couple”, etc. The film is set vaguely in the 1970s, which I know was a tumultuous time as so many times are, just like ours is now, but not even lip service is paid to the hardship of the era. I know there was an oil crisis in the 1970s and the missing gas is probably meant to refer to that. But when we had a radio report about the dented green Ford Pinto used by the bank robbers, the opportunity arose to give some context to the general strife of the time, but if you, for example, don’t know about the energy crisis of the 1970s or can’t place the time period of the film by the cars or the technology, you might not connect the dots—despite the fact there’s a news bulletin on the radio and a newspaper that features prominently, the date is never shown or told. And that’s not good storytelling; it comes across as lazy.
If you’re a regular reader of mine, you might be thinking to yourself “But you’re always railing against movies that don’t trust their audience” and yes, that’s true. We’re in another fine line situation here where if there isn’t enough set dressing, if there isn’t enough context, if there isn’t enough characterization then the movie feels like a collection of loosely connected events rather than a narrative. “What’s my motivation?” isn’t just a joke at the expense of actors, it’s a necessary part of narrative storytelling. Understanding why a character is doing something is just as important or even more so than the fact that they’re doing that thing. There’s an internal dialogue that goes on in each of us that that only we’re privy to and, sure, maybe we go on autopilot sometimes as we roll out of bed and pour ourselves a cup of coffee and get ready for the day, but there’s generally a thought process behind our actions. And as a viewer or a reader of a story, we need to be ushered in past that velvet rope into a person’s mind so we can understand and identify with them. I don’t mind filling in the blanks, but as a narrative, this diner film felt a little undercooked. I know, a restaurant pun. That’s where it left me. With puns.
Although, it’s not all bad news. There were genuinely surprising moments, there were some situations of great tension, but all in all, it leans a little too heavily on the Tarantino-esque influences that make it sometimes feel more like a wave in the ocean than a diamond in the rough. But this is also writer-director Francis Galluppi’s first feature film, and as much as I’ve been down on it, Last Stop still shows promise and marks Galluppi as one to watch. Now, this has a 97% RT score, so I’m well aware that I’m in the minority when it comes to a critical voice and I’m usually in line with critic scores. This one really surprised me because I was very much looking forward to it and it seems right up my alley. However, as much as Bad Times at the El Royale received criticism for being too heavily influenced by Tarantino (and, again, if you know me, you know my opinion of Tarantino is pretty low, so calling something Tarantino-esque is not a compliment from me), I think it was a better movie, with more impactful characters, a meatier story, showstopping performances by both Cynthia Erivo and Jeff Bridges, and a little more to say than Last Stop. The Last Stop in Yuma County reminds me of the Blaise Pascal quote often attributed to Mark Twain, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter”; it takes a level of mastery to tell an effective, impactful, and memorable story in about an hour and a half, like Late Night with the Devil does. But instead of economizing to achieve such a short runtime, it felt like just a little too much was left on the cutting room floor that should have been in the movie.
There’s a kernel here, though, and I do think that Francis Galluppi has the potential to deliver some really good movies in the future and I think Last Stop is a pretty decent start to a feature length career and it’s one that I want to watch. After all, a rookie’s first game is rarely their best, but it shows promise. And it’s fair to say that what did show up on the screen was competently done and well acted; it just wasn’t the complete package. I always like to make sure that I separate liking something or not and thinking something was bad or good. It’s why I bring up 2 Fast 2 Furious so often; you can like something that isn’t good and you can also dislike something that is good (for example, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Nightcrawler was an unlikable film about an utterly despicable character, but it was very good; I just didn’t like it). I don’t want you to leave here thinking this was a bad movie and that you shouldn’t watch if you like a crime thriller; you may just as well find something in it that I didn’t, as 97% of critics did. To me, it was just…middling. And, while that’s not a crime, it would have felt dishonest on my part not to mention the things I felt didn’t work.
But what this movies does do is kick off a crime block, where over the next few weeks I’m going to visit or revisit some crime films; let’s get into the nitty gritty over our beloved outlaws, movies where our protagonists are often on the wrong side of the law. Because in a world where the rule of law is in tatters and the cops can’t be trusted, who else can you turn to for heroics but the outlaw? Modern day gunslingers, baby faced bank robbers, those who operate outside of the law, but not for altruistic purposes like our beloved vigilantes; they can be so damn interesting sometimes. And I’m looking forward to getting into that with you.
