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).
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.
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.
The movie has some claim on being the best of the series, thanks largely to the input of its co-writer and director, Shane Black (who wrote Lethal Weapon , The Last Boy Scout and my nomination for the finest action movie of the 1990s, The Long Kiss Goodnight ).
Essentially, just as Joss Whedon’s distinct storytelling voice was recognisable in Avengers Assemble , so too is that of Iron Man 3 ’s helmer Shane Black, writer-director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and scribe of films like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout .
“Iron Man 3” springs from the mind of the intriguing Shane Black, who has written funny, subversive action films including “Lethal Weapon” and “The Last Boy Scout.”
For Iron Man 3, they've hired Shane Black, the screenwriter of hard-boiled, dark humor-laced action pictures like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout.
The difference here, its clear, is director/cowriter Shane Black, whose scripts for Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout still hold up as winking macho fantasies.
Shane Black , who made his bones writing " Lethal Weapon ," " The Last Boy Scout " and other crash-and-burn action films, was the perfect person to take on "Iron Man 3," and not just because he worked with the franchise's star Robert Downey Jr. on 2005's " Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang ."
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.
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).
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?
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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 .
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.”
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So while his headcase shtick works when playing the fading action star Tugg Speedman (think Bruce Willis around the time of The Last Boy Scout), his behind-the-camera caution works to stifle the script’s cock-eyed anarchy.
The director, who also helmed "Enemy of the State" and "The Last Boy Scout," fills the screen with lots of blood 'n' guts action accompanied by gigantic explosions -- all wonderfully photographed, of course.
Having over-directed "Days of Thunder," "The Last Boy Scout," "True Romance," "The Fan," and "Enemy of the State" with the same macho scramble, Scott is the go-to guy to turn a screenplay into hot coleslaw.
The less-talented Tony is known for big, bombastic stuff like "Top Gun," "The Last Boy Scout" and "Enemy of the State."
Love stories between heterosexual men, if you will, and while this is literalised and even parodied by something like the volleyball scene in Top Gun, it plays out in several of his movies in different ways: the quarrel ending in mutual respect in Crimson Tide, the slow transition from rivals to friends in Days of Thunder, the screwball romantic comedy structure of The Last Boy Scout , the Fatal Attraction -style obsession gone wrong in The Fan .
On the Tony Scott scale of high-gloss quality vs. high-gloss crapola, it ranks much closer to "Crimson Tide" than it does empty vessels of cinematic cool like "Enemy of the State," "Top Gun," "Days of Thunder," "The Fan" or "The Last Boy Scout."
Since Tarantino's reputation was made with the sadistically ultra-violent "Reservoir Dogs," and director Scott has shown a penchant for lurid, stylized violence in "Revenge" and "The Last Boy Scout," "True Romance" would appear to be a match made in the hell of Hollywood.
Utter nonsense, quite frankly, as True Romance is every bit a Tarantino (and an uncredited Roger Avary) movie, from the quirky movie nerd-driven dialogue down to the sudden bouts of excessive violence (with a few race-related slurs thrown in for good measure), but this is Tarantino filtered through the lens of Tony Scott, the man who brought us the sun-drenched vistas and sexy sax music of Beverly Hills Cop II and Top Gun as well as the stylish action of Man on Fire and The Last Boy Scout, and Scott is perhaps this movie’s secret weapon.
The movie’s director, Tony Scott (“Top Gun,” “ Man on Fire ”), was on a streak of directing some supremely bad movies (1990’s “Revenge” and “Days of Thunder,” 1991’s “The Last Boy Scout”), and had lost any clout he may have had.
His last film was the much-anticipated second script by hot writer Shane (Lethal Weapon) Black, called The Last Boy Scout, which was universally panned.
Scott wrapped The Last Boy Scout in June 1991 and was on a flight to Italy when he read the scripts.
Although my personal favorite scene is absolutely in that mode, in an absurdly digressive scene where the cops try to put a wire in Clarence's big drug deal with a movie executive (Saul Rubinek) that Scott intended as a genial piss-take of Joel Silver, producer of the director's personally painful The Last Boy Scout ; it is both wholly comic (the most sustained funny part of the movie), and crackling well-assembled, though like everything in the movie, the editing is a touch on the frantic side.