A brooding, violent, and terminally unwieldy neo-western, The Last Victim attempts to stitch together three disparate elements, and the resulting creation only fitfully come to life, despite the best efforts of a talented cast. Part existential crime drama, part buddy cop movie, and part survival thriller, it constantly wears different guises, feeling artificially inflated with a bloated run time and a sense of self-seriousness.
The Last Victim sees a collision of three groups: a gang of sadistic criminals led by Jake (Ralph Ineson), the cops on their tail, Sheriff Hickey and Deputy Gaboon (Ron Perlman and Camille Legg), and Susan and Richard (Ali Larter and Tahmoh Penikett), an innocent couple who stumble into Jake’s cross hairs. After Richard is shot and killed and Susan flees into the New Mexico wilderness, instigating a desperate cat-and-mouse chase.
Naveen A. Chathapuram’s debut feature is clearly heavily indebted to The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, not least through the world-weary narration provided by principal villain Ineson. An inversion of the voiceover provided by Tommy Lee Jones‘ in the Coens’ Oscar winner, Jake spouts cod-Nietzschean philosophy about the cruelty of nature and the futility of resisting the inevitable. This is hammered home with the action taking place in desiccated frontier towns with names like Negacion (pop. 209 apparently) and Colera. Abandon hope ye who bumble into here. Of course, the Coens’ almost intravenous understanding of tone and pacing is missing here, and they also had the luxury of the Spartan poetry of Cormac McCarthy‘s novel upon which to draw; a narrative so streamlined that it felt like it could have rolled off the page directly onto the screen.
In all honesty, castigating a low-budget thriller for not hitting the highest of watermarks is a little unfair. Chathapuram is able to translate the pursuit elements of Ashley James Louis‘ screenplay into capably shot and enjoyably tense action, with Larter convincing as a resourceful heroine; particularly in a peyote-addled showdown between Susan and Ineson’s be-stetsoned angel of death. A moment filled with some over-cranked but memorable imagery. And there is some enjoyable if predictably sub-Tarantino banter between Perlman and Legg. Even if their mutual joshing rarely progresses the narrative, it does add some emotional boost to events later in the film.
Still, there is too often the sense that the film is constantly being pulled apart by its different elements. One hesitates to return to the Coens, but even in their debut, Blood Simple, they were able to mould the conventions of film noir into something bracing and distinctive. They also instinctively knew which elements to include and which to discard. Louis’ screenplay wants to be too many things at once. It lacks cohesion, and Chathapuram isn’t able to corral these competing instincts in to a fluent viewing experience. The Last Victim is not without its pulpy pleasures; it should simply have focused on these, rather than reaching for a profundity that it misses by some distance.
Available to stream on VoD from Mon 10 Oct 2022