The Last Stand

“How are you, Sheriff?” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s grizzled lawman Ray Owens is asked in the central firefight of “The Last Stand" after hurling himself through the front doors of a bakery. “Old," is his deadpan reply as he staggers to his feet and brushes the debris off his dusty leather jacket. It’s one of several self-deprecating remarks made by the 65-year-old Austrian macho man turned America’s greatest hero in a film much touted to be his big, shining comeback. Like all of them, it’s a sly quip at his advancing age, and, after nine years out of the Hollywood limelight and eight years engaged in Californian politics, aged Arnie certainly has: the skin around his skull is wrapped tight as a drum while his joints move with the unoiled stiffness of the Tin Man.

And yet, in his first time anchoring a movie since 2003’s “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” the Governator’s long-underused action chops remain firmly, stubbornly intact. We got a whiff of them last August in “The Expendables 2,” in which he chomped on cigars and pulled car doors from their hinges, but here we’re given the full-blown package: as the action hero of “The Last Stand,” he fires .44 magnums, dives off rooftops, races supercars and bludgeons badguys to a bloody pulp, and not for one second do we doubt he could do it all — not even when he complains about his dodgy hip. Arnie’s back, and it’s with open arms that we welcome his return.

The film itself, it’s a decent enough Friday-night shoot-em-up which, like its star, works best whenever in action mode, which is thankfully often. Arnie plays the pencil-pushing sheriff of the sleepy Arizona town of Sommerton Junction, which sits quietly in the middle of nowhere, a couple miles north of the Mexican border. It’s the kind of town where everyone knows one another, and so sleepy is it that undelivered milk warrants a 4:00 am emergency phone call to the sheriff.

It’s a peace violently disturbed — on the sheriff’s day off, no less — when international drug cartel Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega, “Vantage Point”), in a stupendously complex action sequence involving a giant magnet and a man in an orange tracksuit, escapes from FBI custody while being transported from Las Vegas. Chased by FBI Agent John Barrister (Forest Whitaker, “The Last King of Scotland”) and taking Agent Ellen Richards (Genesis Rodriguez, “Casa de mi Padre”) as a hostage, Cortez makes a run for the Mexican border in a modified Corvette ZR1, and the only thing standing in his way is Sommerton Junction and its hard-ass sheriff.

Cortez’s mechanically enhanced supercar is capable of reaching speeds over 200 mph, providing ample opportunity for high-octane road stunts — the film’s most ludicrous moment comes when Cortez somehow manages to up-end a police jeep while driving backwards at top speed. It is with this that “The Last Stand” feels geared towards the “Fast and the Furious” crowd, but there’s something unashamedly old-school about the film as Sheriff Owens gathers together a ragtag crew to do battle with the fast-approaching fugitive.

Among the sheriff’s merry band of protectors are his tenderfoot deputies (Jaimie Alexander, Luis Guzman and Rodrigo Santoro), who set up a barricade of cars and buses and await with their guns at the ready. There’s also a gurning Johnny Knoxville as gun nut Lewis Dinkum, whose makeshift museum of vintage weaponry sure does come in handy. Knoxville’s name has been splattered all over the promotional material, but “Jackass" fans will be saddened to learn that, while he does get a hand in on the action, his role is smaller than the trailers and posters deceptively suggest.

The film builds towards a thrilling, ear drum-shattering shootout between the Sommerton police force and Cortez’s henchmen, led by intense Eurotrash badguy Burrell (Peter Stormare, “Lockout”), and then finally towards a climactic bare-knuckle brawl on a bridge that stands atop a canyon. It is in this brawl that Arnie finally bellows his long-missed growl, a mightily garbled “RuUaAaaRgh!” that, much like the rest of Arnie’s scenes, is sure to induce sweet, beautiful nostalgia for long-time fans — we’ve cherished that scream ever since “Conan the Barbarian.”

“The Last Stand” is the English-language debut of South Korean director Jee-woon Kim, whose Sergio Leone-inspired spaghetti western “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” was appropriately titled. The animated wackiness of that 2008 hit is present here, as are its western motifs: the story, after all, is basically a modern-day update of Fred Zinnermann’s  “High Noon.” This is a likable actioner, fully aware of the inherent daftness of its plot and completely devoid of any pretension. Andrew Knauer’s script is lunkheaded and disappointingly provides little in the way of catchy one-liners — the most memorable of them being the hardly classic “I’m the sheriff” — but Arnie’s goofy charm tied with Kim’s stylish direction make this more of a “Commando” than a “Collateral Damage.” Welcome back, Arnold. We’ve missed you.

6/10