THE LAST GUNFIGHT
US, 2025, 98 minutes, Colour.
Jon Voight, Adam Woodward, Charlotte Vega, Eloise Lovell Anderson, Rade Serbedzija, Daniel Bernhardt, Andy Lister, Sam Symons.
Directed by James Bamford.
A succinct and accurate synopsis from the IMDb:
In a brutal underground tournament, the world's top assassins face off against a rogue crew with a deadly plan: infiltrate the competition, survive the bloodbath, and defeat the mastermind behind it.
While not particularly worth watching for itself, even those who say they enjoyed it do not praise it as a film for plotting, performances, dialogue…
The film is a useful test case for assessing sensibility in watching depictions of violence, in appreciating different sensitivities towards the visualising of violence. The audience watching this underground brutal assassins’ elimination competition, affluent, gambling recklessly, vicious in their response, callously happy, no value in any loss of human life.
In assessing a film like this, it can be said that the “what” of the action is 21st century equivalent of gladiatorial combat and audience participation. The question of its value and sensitivities is in “how” it is presented. As one reviewer said simply remarked, it is killing for the sake of killing.
Some say they turn their minds off and just watch the action. But, there must be some moment when audiences should not turn their minds off. They are watching violence but they are watching, at times, mindless and merciless brutality – especially in the figure of a man in a clerical cassock, nicknamed The Reverend, giving absolution to victims, condemning those who don’t have the correct faith, praying with the sign of the cross. He symbolises the ugliness of what we are seeing despite the earnestness of the hero, the plotting behind the scenes, some of the characters with friendly and comic touches.
So, given the excess of the setup of the game, assassins killing assassins, graphically shown (although, of course, there are some films with more graphic gory detail), what is the value of watching this kind of action, its potential for coarsening sensitivities?