Review of the movie "Last Seen Alive" - a cheap action movie with a vengeful Gerard Butler
Gerard Butler rescues his kidnapped spouse in an unsightly second- or even third-rate action movie.
Will (Gerard Butler) goes with his wife Lisa (Jamie Alexander) to visit her parents. Not only is the marriage unenviable - disagreements, cheating spouse and impending divorce - but Lisa suddenly disappears right at the gas station after stopping for a minute at a nearby supermarket. Will quickly flips out: first he calls the police, and then he turns to amateur sleuthing, trying to track down the missing woman on his own. In yesterday's real estate developer and peaceful family man suddenly awakens a marksman and a hardy soldier - the case turns out to be very dark.
Gerard Butler, star of "300 Spartans" and "Good Citizen," decided to sell his soul to producers, riveting third-rate action movies. Not the most noble way for an artist who showed promise in the 2010s, but a deal is a deal - the same way went Bruce Willis and Liam Neeson, whose diabolical contract, it seems, has lasted for the second decade. Butler began relatively recently, although his machista potential realized in full: starred in the action trilogy about a special agent who saves the presidents and world leaders ("The Fall of Olympus / London / Angel"), and then along the beat: daring cops, submarine captains, professional killers - the main series of numbers, which can boast the Scottish actor. Since then, the creative output differs only in the level of facial hair: in one film Butler is shaved, in another - not. One can dispense with the chart to see the actor's regression: from expensive theatrical action films, Butler has moved on to thrillers that don't get wide coverage. In this sense, "Last Seen Alive" is a crossing of the red line, threatening the actor with inglorious years and an avalanche of duds in the "movies for cable TV" format. The press is saving their nerves and point-blank ignores Brian Goodman's film; if there are isolated reviews, they appear as a testing ground for eloquence, and the Russian premiere of the film, one might say, is organized for purely medical purposes - as ammonia for fainting rentals.
"Last Seen Alive" is a thriller with a rare diagnosis, a neglected case even for the penny film industry, where films are created on their knees for a quick profit. First of all, the authors do not have any resources to even trivialize the viewer - the genre and the conditions set by the plot require it: the hero's wife disappears right in the grocery store, and minutes later the spouse is already as on red-hot coals. There's no telling what happened to Jamie Alexander's heroine: she could have met a lover, fallen down the rabbit hole, or gotten stuck in her favorite cooking department. Or embarked on a clever gamble in the vein of Amy Dunn from "The Disappeared" - the marriage is breathing heavily anyway, in which case there is always a reason to teach her husband a lesson. But no. Director Brian Goodman and screenwriter Mark Friedman took the path of least resistance, dropping the ballast of contrived intrigue half an hour before the finale: all the answers are spoon-fed, and you don't have to go far to get the truth - the wife gets into criminal trouble. However, how yesterday's real estate developer became a marksman and was able to take out the criminals himself is a separate question that even the script is too lazy to answer. With Liam Neeson in "Hostage," for example, was much easier - in a retired military man awakened the beast and instantly pulled out of retirement bliss. In "Last Seen Alive", clearly written on the run and anyhow, the plot is too lazy to dive into explanations: simple, complex, unexpected, stupid. Why, really, to multiply the essence unnecessarily - and so it will do.
It is clear that the authors staked on Butler's emotional intelligence, but the "300 Spartans" star has always been rather unconcerned and apathetic (which is what accounted for his most successful performances - including King Leonidas' cold fortitude). The best indicator of Will's condition is the sweat-soaked shirt in which the spouse valiantly spends the entire hour and a half: kicking a suspect, running from the police, sneaking into the safe house. There is, of course, an ironic moment where Butler turns on the acting, talking his teeth into some obese security guard - and even that you can't watch without pity and an underlying feeling as if you're being mocked. Otherwise, both Butler's character and his wife are stuck in the beta stage (there are still some lame flashbacks that try to show the inconsistency of the marriage, but yield stock photography-level results). The film has no characters, no development, no sane motivation - it's a raw product, left and forgotten in the editing room, whose rendering they decided not to bother with. There's laughable waffling of each other - a fight of sorts. There is a disconcerting computer explosion - in terms of rendering quality, we've probably seen this in video games from twenty years ago. There is also a "unique" color-correction solution, with a raw and dead picture that is definitely not conducive to movie theater viewing - something like this is only worth including in the background.
"Last Seen Alive" is the steel nail in the coffin of action cinema, a genre riddled with exhaustion over the past thirty or forty years ("another second-rate American action film" is a full-fledged epithet). If there is an abstract digital graveyard of streaming shooters, Brian Goodman's film should join those ranks. Ruthless in its cheapness, laughable in its acting, and released in an undercooked form, any masculine output of Butler will now be met with great suspicion.
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