The Last Victim Review: A Neo-Western Shrouded in a Coen-Sized Shadow

Distractingly indebted to No Country for Old Men, the film’s wild tonal swings mostly leave it feeling impossibly disjointed.

The Last Victim
Photo: Decal

The influence of Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men can be felt in nearly every scene of The Last Victim. The catalyst for a torrent of violence in Naveen A. Chathapuram’s neo-western is a witness, Richard (Tahmoh Penikett), to a murder. It’s a moment that leaves this innocent man caught between symbols of light and darkness—a world-weary officer of the law, Sheriff Hickey (Ron Perlman), on one side and a brooding, implacable, and deeply reflective killer, Jake (Ralph Ineson), on the other, characters that are clearly modeled after Anton Chigurh and Ed Tom Belle from the Coen brothers’ film.

But for all of Chathapuram and co-screenwriter Ashley James Louis’s efforts to conjure the same uneasy tension between traditional rural American values and an intruding modernity that courses through No Country for Old Men, The Last Victim is a pale imitation. The Coens, in adapting Cormac McCarthy’s superlative source novel, seamlessly weaved wry humor into a bleak, fatalistic portrait of a dying way of life. And while Chathapuram and company certainly try to inject some black humor into The Last Victim, the wild tonal swings from one storyline to the other mostly leave the film feeling impossibly disjointed.

The strongest of The Last Victim’s three intersecting storylines centers on Susan (Ali Larter), who flees from Jake and his fellow goons (played by Kyle Schmid, Matt Brown, and Paul Belsito) after they shoot and kill her husband. As she seeks refuge in a remote nature reserve, the film turns into a survivalist thriller, building suspense from the volatile psychological state of Larter’s character and the unforgiving, barren environment that she finds herself trapped in. The cat-and-mouse aspect of these scenes is familiar, but Chathapuram brings some visual panache to the stripped-down scenario and gets some good mileage out of the vengeance-fueled Susan outsmarting men who initially appear to be far more skilled than her.

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The Last Victim, though, is more turgid than taut whenever it shrouds itself in existential gravitas. Jack’s voiceover is especially egregious, given its heavy-handed proclamations about fate, revenge, and the natural order of things, which are made all the more ridiculous by the film’s rote plot. Elsewhere, The Last Victim delights in the lighthearted repartee between Hickey and his underling, Deputy Mindy Gaboon (Camille Legg). But this stretch more directly undermines the severity of Susan’s ordeal, as all the small-town hijinks and meandering conversations often have little to do with the murders that are being investigated.

The Last Victim eventually comes to feel like three separate films have been awkwardly stitched together, with each storyline clashing with, rather than enhancing, one another. On top of that, we also get an epilogue that feels like it’s been imported from a completely different film. The filmmakers take a big swing in trying to drive home the script’s pronouncements about the nature of fate, but they stretch credulity so far past the breaking point that they reveal themselves to be out of their depths, leaving us with a film that’s perpetually spiraling out of control in ways that are difficult to rationalize.

Score: 
 Cast: Ron Perlman, Ali Larter, Ralph Ineson, Dakota Daulby, Tahmoh Penikett, Kyle Schmid, Tom Stevens, Kit Sheehan, Gregory Fawcett, Camille Legg  Director: Naveen A. Chathapuram  Screenwriter: Ashley James Louis, Naveen A. Chathapuram  Distributor: Decal  Running Time: 111 min  Rating: R  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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