The Last Man

Rarely I write negative reviews as I always try to find something positive in a movie, particularly it if features one of my favorite actors. I am a fan of Hayden Christensen and enjoyed his performances in Star Wars, Jumper and Outcast, however they all had some plot and a normal storyline. This movie might be a simulation of PTSD-induced psychosis, I have no idea, but if so, it should have been a documentary. As it is, it is unpleasant to watch and difficult to follow. 2 stars and only because of Hayden. Otherwise it is a solid 1 star - one of the worst movies I have ever watched.

A hobby of mine is to check out the reviews of really bad movies and to expose the astro-turfed reviews. Every single person that reviewed this movie favorably has only one review on IMDB. A pox on whoever is paying these people! The other thing I want to ask is: Why, Harvey, Why?!?

I've noticed that some who review here vote based upon their "loyalties" to certain actors, genre, or other specifics or topics within the movie. For example, I like Harvey Keitel, but I'm not going to automatically give a movie like this a fake rating because of that. Or the fact that I tend to enjoy Sci-Fi, but again, simply because it happens to qualify under that category I cannot pretend this movie was something it is not. This movie proves both: Great actors can star in bad movies, and certain topics we all "wish" worked out can fail miserably. I really wish more people would start rating based upon reality - and put their loyalties aside.

Imagine your screenwriting professor hands you the following assignment: craft a script that builds a collage of at least 5 films and includes absolutely nothing original. The last man apparently was written for that class. It's 1 part "Jacob's Ladder", 1 part "Babylon AD", 1 part "Take Shelter", 1 part "Mutant Chronicles" (for the shots of vintage trench warfare in the 21st century), 1 part "Green Room" (for the cheese eating neo-Nazis) and a bit of "The Sixth Sense". Nothing about it is good. The plot goes something like this: a soldier with PTSD returns to his family house in the city he grew up in, and after an encounter with a street preacher decides to build a secret bunker in the basement, which puts him at odds with his boss, who accuses him of stealing money from the company to pay for the equipment. He is put into a mental institution that is predictably operating at the level of a Victorian era sanitarium, but because he saved the preacher from neo-Nazis by going Chuck Norris on them, he is able to escape when the neo-Nazis predictably show up at the sanitarian looking for revenge with a cattle prod. Yup, you might have thought there was a movie there from the first few lines of plot, but pretty quickly to realize it's a hot mess of what are trying to pass for "action" elements tossed together in an under-developed, un-interesting ways. The film tries to rely on over-darkening shot after shot to try to create tension and anticipation, but frankly it just makes you want to close your eyes and go to sleep. After enjoying Mr. Chirstiansen's recent foray into rom-com, "Little Italy", an unpretentious opportunity for him to demonstrate something that passed for acting range, he is back playing the Anakin Skywalker emotion set... brooding and isolation, paranoid schizophrenia, and murderous psychopathy. Not to mention creeping on the woman he is working for, leading to another "forbidden" relationship. Frankly, he plays it better this time in as 40-year-old messed up PTSD veteran, than when he was playing a hot teenage jedi hitting on a 30(?) year old Imperial Senator, but the core set of empathies are the same. The rest of the acting is just garbage. Harvey Keitel phones it in for the pay-check trying to pull off a comical Moses evoking fake beard.

I watched this movie and thought it was phenomenal, the main character story was touching and had me invested the whole way and I found myself truly caring about the story. So In the end I don't understand why people rate this bad but I found it a very interesting and investing story.

Waste of time... absolutely awful acting with a crap plot. Haydn's drunken-like accent was so irritating that I had subtitles on and volume down low to avoid listening to it. A really excellent attempt at making a 3rd rate movie... Well done!