(NOTE: I reviewed this movie already, but I hated what I wrote. I polished up some words here and there. Enjoy!)
There is no such thing as a sure-fire blockbuster in Hollywood. You may have "hot" stars and filmmakers booked, but as cooks can tell you, the consumer's taste towards the dish isn't be as predictable as the recipe can be followed.
Warner Bros. must have thought they had a guaranteed hit on their hands with THE LAST BOY SCOUT. Producer Joel Silver, behind Hollywood action classics DIE HARD and LETHAL WEAPON, paid a record-$1.75 million for WEAPON scripter Shane Black, followed by booking action star Bruce Willis and director Tony Scott.
Yet THE LAST BOY SCOUT, despite its potency on paper, shot blanks in theatres. While it was marketed as yet another LETHAL WEAPON-esque buddy cop shoot'em up picture, SCOUT is really a polarizing affair even for genre fans.
Take the opening sequence, where a drug-junkie football player is rushing down the field while firing his gun at the Linebackers to score a touchdown. And you thought the infamous "Basketbrawl" between Ron Artest and Pistons fans was brutal. If you can't get beyond this crazyness, press the Stop button.
SCOUT faithfully follows the action tempo and gunplay as expected of that epoch in Action Cinema, including a major car chase that's too much LETHAL WEAPON 2 for my taste. But it just hikes such crazy-ass option plays that don't just come out of no where, they shock you that a major Hollywood release actually got away with them.
From a kid and father yelling F-bombs at each other, to a hero (awesomely) killing a thug by a punch to the nose, and the quotable as hell dialogue from Mr. Black...
Wife:I was lonely! Willis:Go buy a dog.
Guys can't help but recite such misogynistic lines over and over....which I guess is a compliment, as much as Dave Chappelle helping to make "bitch" virtually a verb in America's dictionary.
In fact, in this tale of two guys stuck way over their heads in a deadly conspiracy which celebrates and jabs the genre's cliches, this seems eeriely way too much like Shane Black's later directorial effort KISS KISS BANG BANG, though SCOUT isn't so blatant.
Hell, my biggest problem with SCOUT is in its Third Act where, like BANG, the material reaches a point where it gets too self-aware of how smart it is. I mean, a villain saying "Yeah, I'm the bad guy"?
That's not clever, that's just silly.
But otherwise, I rather enjoyed THE LAST BOY SCOUT and its macho-nutty tale of two depressed losers deep in funk who fight each other, and race in citing the next witty one-liner.
With such financial "guaranteed" Hollywood misfires from Bryan Singer's flat SUPERMAN RETURNS to Peter Jackson's boring 3-hour(!) KING KONG remake, I guess I am actually pleased that THE LAST BOY SCOUT was actually pretty good, maybe even a tad ahead of its time.
Consider that Tony Scott's next movie was TRUE ROMANCE, scripted by a self-proclaimed major fan of SCOUT in Quentin Tarantino.
