THE LAST STAND

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After watching Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lukewarm performance, you’ll hope that this bombastic exercise in gunplay is his last stand as an actor. Made up of composite cliché parts from various action flicks, “The Last Stand” is an oddly stilted affair.

The former Governator plays Ray Owens, the badass sheriff of Sommerton Junction, a small boarder town that marks the final U.S. pass-through for escaped Mexican drug lord Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega). Cortez is on the run from Las Vegas FBI agents. With a female FBI agent hostage sitting in the passenger seat, Cortez hits speeds of over 200 mph in a stolen supercharged Corvette. The Chevrolet product placement couldn’t be any more obvious. The lawless speed-demon gets considerable advance road assistance from a gang of well-armed greasers led by Peter Stormare’s pathological killer Burrell.

Screenwriter Andrew Knauer doesn’t bother himself with too many continuity details regarding the staging for the film’s slow-to-arrive title climax on Sommerton’s main street. The movie reads as a puff-piece of pro-NRA propaganda. Guns and ammunition are fetishized. When a faceless baddie shows up in granny’s front room, she reaches into her handy knitting basket for the gun that will end his time on this planet.

Director Jee-woon Kim (“I Saw the Devil”) captures the fragmented eruptions of violence without giving a sufficient degree of character- illumination in the process. The effect is akin to watching a cartoon where you’re not familiar with the characters. Here’s one more mediocre movie ejected into the realm of January multiplex hell.

Rated R. 106 mins.

THE BAYTOWN OUTLAWS

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Confirmation that January scrapes the bottom of the barrel for film releases, “The Baytown Outlaws” is as run-down a piece of cinematic tripe as you would expect. Checking in on the waning careers of Billy Bob Thornton and Eva Longoria, newbie co-screenwriter/director Barry Battles does neither actor any favors.

Also burned at the altar of filmic crap is Thomas Brodie-Sangster (“Nanny McPhee”), who once seemed to have a bright future ahead.

A Tarantino-knock-off of the lowest order, “The Baytown Outlaws” announces its shoddy intentions with an opening blood bath sequence that is a study in bad taste. Good old boy Alabama redneck siblings McQueen (Travis Fimmel), Lincoln (Daniel Cudmore), and Brick Oodie (Clayne Crawford) dole out shotgun justice for local Sheriff Henry Millard (Andre Braugher). If they accidentally off the wrong bunch of lowlifes, so what?

Enter slinky Celeste (Langoria) to bait the scuzzy bunch with $25,000 in bounty money them to extract her 17-year-old wheelchair bound (and mute) son Rob (Brodie-Sangster) from the clutches of her well defended drug kingpin ex Carlos (Thornton). Rob’s trust fund is about to come due on the boy’s 18th birthday. Killing Carlos is part of the assignment. Clichés surface like flies on manure. A fancy-pants ATF detective from Chicago rattles Sherriff Millard’s cage. The snotty Sherriff, in turn, spares no opportunity to insult and snub the Northern intruder.

The Oodie boys botch the kidnapping inasmuch as they leave Carlos alive to send his thugs after them. The story collapses into a chase-and-battle adventure that leave much blood smeared on various surfaces. Here is a movie that will last one week at your local cinema. Even that, is one week too long.

Rated R. 98 mins.

ZERO STARS

 

THE IMPOSSIBLE

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Yet one more example of a real-life story someone thought would “make a great movie,” “The Impossible” is as flat and predictable as they come. The story is based on one family’s precarious survival of the Christmas Day, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which was caused by the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake.

The only thing the film has to offer — and it is no small contribution — is its impressive special effects that put the audience right in the middle of Mother Nature’s most destructive wrath.

The tsunami sequences are astounding, and not for the weak or elderly. This is big screen spectacle like you’ve not seen before. Even Clint Eastwood’s immersive treatment of the same devastating event in his 2010 film “Hereafter,” pales by comparison.

Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts play a British couple — Henry and Maria — who are on holiday at a beach resort hotel in Thailand. Oblivious to the warning signals of the approaching wall of water, the family is broadsided by the catastrophe that separates the family in the blink of an eye. The badly wounded Maria searches with her oldest son Lucas (Tom Holland) for the rest of their family. Henry, in the meantime, carries out his own desperate attempt to reunite with his family.

Although the ensemble performances are solid, the story is simple to a fault. Not every dramatic real-life story can be turned into a great or even good movie. “The Impossible” falls somewhere below mediocre.

Rated PG13. 107 mins.