The Last Run (1971)

(On Cable TV, April 2022) I’ve got this theory that one of the reasons why Classic Hollywood movies (anything before 1967) endure well is that there’s little basis for comparison with today’s films – they were doing something different due to the constraints of the Production Code, the tastes of the public and the technology of the time. Comparisons get closer and less favourable once you get into the New Hollywood era, especially when they attempt styles and genres perfected since then. So, the appeal of a proto 1970s car chase action movie like The Last Run doesn’t really resonate today as much as it did then – and considering that The Last Run wasn’t particularly well-received at the time, then imagine how it plays now. Glumly executed in the most annoying tradition of 1970s New Hollywood, The Last Run is absolutely not fun at all: it features an aging mob driver (a dour George C. Scott) living a miserable existence, tasked with one last job ferrying a killer from one country to another. You can already see the ways in which the film is not meant as crowd-pleasing entertainment, but the way it’s executed sucks whatever thrills the idea of a multi-country car chase could have led to – director Richard Fleischer doesn’t have much success staging stunts and action scenes, and it’s not as if the state of the art at the time was all that impressive in the first place. By the time the film ends on a sour note, The Last Run cements its status as a film to forget – substandard even by the yardsticks of the time, and now even less impressive. New Hollywood was a specific taste, and it doesn’t match with the idea of a fun action thriller.