Classic Movie Review : The Last Boy Scout (1991)
Shane Black is one of these artists who audiences love in retrospect. Everyone appreciated his movies (Lethal Weapon, Iron Man 3, etc.) during their initial theatre runs, but no one knew who he was. He’s one of these names you appreciate through their entire body of work when you realize they have a body of work to speak of, like David Lynch or Ari Aster. They only make sense once you understand they had a thing of their own no one could imitate.
I had never seen Shane Black's cult classic The Last Boy Scout before last week, but it totally happened because of a Patrick Willems YouTube video and a subsequent viewing of his masterpiece The Nice Guys (which I totally undersold in the initial review by the way). This is what happens when you’re good and original enough to have a body of work. Your art finds its people.
The Last Boy Scout tells the story of washed up private detective Joe Hellenbeck (freakin’ Bruce Willis) and disgraced pro football quarterback Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans) who are brought together by what initially seems like a boring surveillance job. Their shared ordeal turns into a murder investigation, which turns into a all out conspiracy that’ll have them fighting for their lives. Because that’s what happens to pure hearted men in the mean streets of L.A.
Your mom’s mean streets of L.A
To be frank, there isn’t much to The Last Boy Scout. It’s a very bare movie. It consist mostly in two adult men bantering with each other and shooting guns at nondescript people. That said, it’s not unentertaining at all. The Last Boy Scout is one of these movies that entirely happened before the internet and therefore had no concerns about realism. It’s crazy. What happens in this movie has no bearing whatsoever with what could happen in real life.
For example, Jimmy Dix’s girlfriend (played by freakin’ Halle Berry) gets shot with a machine gun in the middle of the street. No hired killer ever does business like this. What happens in The Last Boy Scout is what happens in your mom’s head whenever she thinks about her grownup child living in the city. It’s called hyperreality. It’s a reality that you imagine from headlines, memes and various mediated reports. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything.
Since The Last Boy Scout basically happens in a version of Los Angeles that doesn’t exist, it really frees up the narrative from any realistic concerns. So, it’s basically a contemporary swashbuckling adventure lead by a constantly hungover has-been and a very athletic gambling addict. Good guys are good guys because they want to right the wrongs. Bad guys are bad guys before they wield guns at whoever wants to right the wrong.
It’s great. Embracing stereotypes can be liberating.
The Crucible of Friendship
Another aspect of buddy cop movies that matters is… well, the buddy cop part. Even if Hellenbeck and Dix technically aren’t cops. They just perform together the duties you’d normally expect cops to perform: forcefully asking questions, appropriated dishing out threats, bringing justice to the downtrodden, etc. Part of the point of watching The Last Boy Scout is watching two unlikely friends turning into beacons of morality and justice.
I don’t know what it is about blossoming male friendship that is so watchable. It makes people (including yours truly) feel like major problems have been overcome when two men put their ego aside to work on something greater than themselves. They never truly put their egos aside because they keep going back and forth, but it matters because they draw a line between their ego and what is morally right. It makes you feel that anyone can do it.
Or not.
Perhaps it’s because this sort of thing never ever happens in real life. People who are job obsessed outside of movie were then (and still now) perceived to be joyless, status obsessed losers if they aren’t celebrities. In a way, The Last Boy Scout exemplifies a contradiction of Hollywood movies: it makes people we either don’t really want to be or shouldn’t be seductive for a well-frame two hours period. Tony Scott and Shane Black are just more transparent about their protagonists not being real people.
*
I liked The Last Boy Scout, but I didn’t think it qualified as a cult classic. It’s a strong buddy cop movie that is very much of its era and that shows sophistication in storytelling, but that’s kind of it? It’s more or less paint-by-numbers after that. People remember it kindly because it’s part of a tradition of better written movies that emphasized character development over mandatory set pieces like shootouts or car chases. It’s worth a watch, but it’s not a classic.
