Adapted by Howard Michael Gould from his novel of the same name, Tim Kirkby’s Last Looks is rooted in the classic mold of the whodunit and brims with eccentric personalities. The most prominent among them is Charlie Waldo (Charlie Hunnam), who lives mostly off the grid and keeps a strict limit on items he owns at 100. He’s also a former star LAPD detective who burned bridges with his colleagues by exposing the widespread corruption in the department. Waldo’s peaceful, ascetic lifestyle is eventually disrupted when he’s dragged into the mystery of the murdered wife of Alastair Pinch (Mel Gibson), an alcoholic, has-been actor and prime suspect in the investigation.
Sadly, the offbeat quirkiness that defines the film’s characters doesn’t always rub off on the narrative itself. No matter how many shallow, secretive oddballs Waldo encounters on his meandering tour through Los Angeles—from giddily sycophantic TV network head Wilson Sikorsky (Rupert Friend) to Jayne (Lucy Fry), a kindergarten teacher and femme fatale with a knack for seducing high-profile individuals—Last Looks fails to escape its aura of familiarity.
Even though the storyline is perfunctory and unsurprising, it’s never incoherent, which can’t be said about the film’s tone. Throughout, it’s not uncommon for Last Looks to awkwardly shift from gritty police procedural to noir-soaked melodrama to madcap mystery adventure, à la Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, over the course of a few scenes.
The film noticeably settles into a comfortable groove when leaning into acerbic comedy, such as a gleefully anarchic sequence when Waldo observes a drunk, belligerent Alastair Pinch taping his show Johnnie’s Bench—only to find that much of the time on set consists of Sikorsky and others bending over backward trying to appease the high-maintenance star. The extravagant comedy of the scene strikes a complementary balance with the characters’ outsized personalities, but the zippy punchiness that marks the sequence quickly dissipates.
Early in Last Looks, a reluctant Waldo is forced back into detective work through an ingenious contrivance: The detective’s appointment on Pinch’s case is made public, much like a blockbuster production’s casting announcement, by being published in the trades. The filmmakers cannily lampoon publicity-minded Hollywood by suggesting that Pinch’s network views the murder case itself as audience-friendly entertainment. It’s a whip-smart moment, but the conventional mystery that the film subsequently tends to belies any satiric intention. Lacking such bite, Last Looks reduces itself to a disposable, tepid exercise in genre posturing.
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