Review: The Last Shot

Right before the credits to writer-director Jeff Nathanson’s The Last Shot begin to roll, Matthew Broderick turns to Alec Baldwin while sitting inside Grauman’s Chinese Theater and tells the projectionist to “play it again, Sam!” It’s a reference, of course, to Casablanca, except that Humphrey Bogart never actually said the line in Michael Curtiz’s 1942 classic. Not even close, but it’s a lie that audiences have unwittingly spread over the years. (The line does appear in the Marx Brothers spoof A Night in Casablanca.)

Nathanson, writer of Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal, seems to understand the way Hollywood trades in lies. Loosely adapted from a 1996 article published in Details magazine, The Last Shot tells the story of an aspiring filmmaker, Steven Schats (Broderick), who’s convinced that he’s going to make his directorial debut with the film Arizona, the melodramatic story of his sister’s death in the Grand Canyon. Except that Steven’s producer, Joe Devine (Baldwin), is really an F.B.I. agent, and pre-production for Arizona is a ruse for the government to get their hands on high-profile mob figures living on the East Coast.

While there’s something to be said about a film this eager to give the finger to the dream factory that made it, The Last Shot struggles to make a discernable point; more clever in concept than execution, it’s more or less a neutered version of Robert Altman’s The Player. Nathanson recognizes the allure of Hollywood but doesn’t exactly care to scrutinize it. Worse, The Last Shot can be a total head-scratcher. From Joan Cusack’s psychotic exec to Toni Collette’s primadonna actress, the performances are as inspired as the outlandish references to late-term abortions and Clifford the dog’s huge red testicles, but what do any of these random acts of humor really have to do with the Hollywood industry?