Riding the coat-tails of the early 1990's Western revival, the HBO television movie The Last Outlaw is a good, taut B-picture evoking the conventions of bigger and better Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and 70s. Set in New Mexico in 1873, from the opening bank robbery onwards the movie plays like The Wild Bunch meets High Plains Drifter, the obsessive, psychotic Colonel Graff (Mickey Rourke at his best) hunting down his own men after they refuse to abandon an injured comrade. Facing up to Graff is the impressively understated Dermot Mulroney as Eustis, a man who has... seen too much killing and simply wants it to stop. Writer Eric Red spins some interesting variations on a classic Western set-up, delivering a comparable psychological intensity to his earlier The Hitcher (1986); as the story unfolds Graff becomes an avenging emissary of death, the tale assuming a timeless mythological resonance. Director Geoff Murphy stages what comes down to one long chase with considerable style, and while there's nothing here fans of the genre haven't seen many times before, in an age starved of Westerns that's actually a large part of the appeal. --Gary S Dalkin [show more]
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