The Last Boy Scout ★★★½
AFTER bursting onto the big screen with the first two Die Hard movies, Bruce Willis hit a wall.
It started with the ill-conceived comedy Hudson Hawk and continued for four years until Quentin Tarantino threw him into the cast of Pulp Fiction in 1994 when his revival (of sorts) began.
One of those wilderness films, The Last Boy Scout from 1991, is a guilty pleasure (see the full list on a separate page), thanks mainly to a strong creative combination.
It’s directed by Tony Scott who made of string of good action films until his death in 2012 and co-written by Shane Black.
Black is a master of snappy, put-down buddy dialogue, the type that is also on show in his scripts for Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, The Long Kiss Goodnight and, most recently, The Nice Guys.
The charismatic Willis is the perfect mouthpiece for the dialogue and is matched with comedian Damon Wayans whose performance hits just the right notes to complement the Willis’ character.
On the surface this is a constantly entertaining, hard-as-nails yet comic drama about a private investigator (Willis) who tries to solve the murder of a stripper (Halle Berry) with the aid of her former boyfriend (Wayans).
The pair are similar. The private eye, who was a secret service agent, now has drinking and marital problems , is rarely at home, argues constantly with his wife and daughter and gets by on scraps of jobs thrown to him by friends.
The boyfriend was a quarterback with an NFL team who has also fallen on hard times after injury led to painkillers and then drugs and being dumped from the sport.
Both have smart-ass personalities that make some people want yo hit them and, during the course of the film a collection of low-life guns for hire, corrupt politicians or vicious businessmen, do just that. I lost count of the number of times Willis’s character was punched in the face.
The violence is as tough as the action and the two leads play their characters well and draw out your sympathies.
In some ways the film is also about the evils inflicted on society and individuals by gambling mainly but also addictions generally. In the end it’s an action movie, but there is a message there as well.