The Last Boy Scout (1991)
Directed by Tony Scott
Somewhere in Los Angeles, the city of broken dreams, a stripper is murdered. Now, the private detective she had hired and her ex-footballer boyfriend are going to find her murderer... if they don't kill each other first. But the more they dig, the deeper they become enmeshed in a web of extortion, blackmail and corrupt politics hidden beneath the surface of professional football.
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What critics compared The Last Boy Scout to
Black, who costarred in the original Predator and cowrote this new installment, has intermittently flourished as both a writer (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout) and a writer-director (Iron Man 3, The Nice Guys), and he remains a reliable source of zippy and fantastically profane dialogue, the laughs and the winces layered just so.
Black had a reputation for being a purveyor of some of the greatest action movie screenplays of the 80’s and 90’s, including Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, before breaking out into directing with 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Ever since he first came up with the characters of Riggs and Murtaugh in 1987’s Lethal Weapon, Black has been slowly but surely building up his resume and experience with the likes of The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero and The Long Kiss Goodnight.
Shane Black may have a reputation as an action writer (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout), but his true stock in trade is smart-ass repartée, especially in some of the films he has directed, including Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys.
Cela dit, j’avais quand même espoir que The Predator serait un retour en force, étant coscénarisé (avec Fred Dekker) et réalisé par nul autre que Shane Black, à qui l'on doit notamment les scénarios de Lethal Weapon et The Last Boy Scout ainsi que les films Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3 et The Nice Guys.
For those who don’t know, Shane Black is responsible for writing cult-classic films of the 1980s and 1990s, including Lethal Weapon (1987), The Monster Squad (1987), The Last Boy Scout (1991), Last Action Hero (1993) and The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996).
Joe Carnahan's own throwback Copshop is considerably better, mainly because it chooses to rip off stuff like Assault on Precinct 13 and Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight --oh, and its vibe is Tango & Cash or The Last Boy Scout : everything I like in a small-environment thriller married to all the bombast of a '90s Shane Black vehicle--and just as inappropriate and ugly as that sounds.
Anyway, "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is a first-time directorial effort by Shane Black, who is nevertheless no stranger to humorous action movies, having written "Lethal Weapon," "Last Action Hero," and "The Last Boy Scout."
He wrote "Lethal Weapon," "The Last Boy Scout," "Last Action Hero" and "The Long Kiss Goodnight," huge, noisy films, all of them, with ludicrous plots and over-the-top action sequences.
Not just Lethal Weapon but The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight.
In the early '90s, Black was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood, thanks to Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black made his name as the go-to guy for witty, action-packed thrillers, with films such as The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight.
The wunderkind, who broke the million-dollar script ceiling and stamped screenwriters' names into the public consciousness with such efforts "Lethal Weapon" and "The Last Boy Scout," wrote and directed this highly original postmodern L.A. noir.
I recently posted that my idea for a football horror movie would be to follow Billy Blanks’ tragic character Billy Cole from The Last Boy Scout, coincidentally starring Damon Wayans.
Like many “unauthorized” films that feature American pro football, Him is obliged to omit any trademarks connected to the real-world NFL (see also: North Dallas Forty, The Last Boy Scout, Any Given Sunday).
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Which is to say that anyone hoping for the verbal and conceptual excesses of The Long Kiss Goodnight or The Last Boy Scout may be disappointed, despite an outré opening sequence that links violent death, cheesy erotica, and teenage guilt.
They really should have waited, and hated him for writing "The Last Boy Scout," "The Last Action Hero" and "The Long Kiss Goodnight," a perfect triple-feature of slick, violent trash.
So much money lavished on bloody buddy formula, on two-fisted archetypes cracking a case, some heads and lots of one-liners, much of it familiar from his earlier scripts — Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang — and almost defiantly meaningless.
Black excels at making mismatched buddy movies (he made his directorial debut with the wonderful “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”), and he helped define the action era with his screenplays for “Lethal Weapon” and “The Last Boy Scout.”
Like many of the films Black penned during his initial glory days as Hollywood’s go-to screenwriter for macho-comical action films (his credits include 1987’s Lethal Weapon, 1991’s The Last Boy Scout, and 1993’s Last Action Hero), The Nice Guys is a buddy movie about two unlikely partners who are forced to work together.
For The Nice Guys (2016), Shane Black, who helped remake the modern American action movie with his screenplays Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, slips into flashback mode for a tribute to the old school action movies and private eye thrillers of the 1970s mixed with Black’s knowing sense of humor.
Victor is introduced scoring the winning touchdown in the big game (and no one has shot a football game with such totemic extravagance since Tony Scott's The Last Boy Scout ) that features one of the film's three countdown clocks, though this one is nonsense because once a play starts in football... Never mind, who gives a fuck?
The Michael Bay-esque bravado and the Tony Scott-esque homoeroticism are borrowed intact; there are scenes in Fuzz that wouldn't look out of place were they to be played straight in the likes of Bad Boys II or The Last Boy Scout.
Homophobic insults are frequent, perhaps an intentional callback to ‘90s action films like The Last Boy Scout .
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Its late director, Tony Scott (also of True Romance and The Last Boy Scout) came to feature films via painting and then production of commercials and music videos, retaining a searing visual sensibility that set even his paycheck projects apart.
Director Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”) and writer Richard Wenk (“The Expendables 2”) could have made the exact same movie and called it “The Protectorizer,” “The Retributionizer” or, if it weren’t already a goofy, ’90s relic of an action movie, “The Last Boy Scout.”