3 YEARS AGO… NEW YORK CITY
A shiny black Cadillac is parked in the middle of the street. The reflection in the driver’s side door reveals an ambulance not far away. A wet-eyed little girl sits in the back of the car, looking at a dead man in the driver’s seat. A gray-haired gentlemen sits dead next to him. A police officer quietly approaches the vehicle, opens the door, and takes the girl to the back of the ambulance.
Intrigued by the opening scene? Then you really need to start paying attention, because this movie will not serve you the answers on a silver platter. Starring tough-guy Michael Madsen, ganster rapper DMX, post-mordem sex icon David Carradine, and a couple of nobodies, Last Hour will have even the most clever viewers scratching their heads along the way. You may find it in the Action section, with the word “EXPLOSIVE” printed on the back of the case, but trust me, it's also one heck of a mystery! Next scene…
PRESENT DAY, HANGER NEAR MEXICAN BORDER
A greasy, long-haired man stands alone under a spotlight. It’s night time. A truck pulls up in front of a row of parked cars, releasing a dozen or more immigrants from its cargo box. They clamour to get inside the waiting vehicles. Three well-dressed men walk up to the greasy mullet, and hand him a case. A dense, hardly-discernible European accent speaks.
“I still can’t figure out how you did that trick, Monk. We’re been trying to do that for 10 years. No success. And believe me, we know all the powerful people in America.”
“Yeah? I got a few friends myself,” replies the ever-raspy Michael Madsen, simply owning that tangled wig.
The Monk
After a short, incomprehensible exchange of words, the character “Monk” flashes a revolver and the three men walk away. Now free to speak their native tongue, we read as one of them asks for permission to “take care of him”. The case-handler calmly answers with a question of his own:
“Do you know why they call him Monk?”
The legend, according to this man, begins with a Catholic boarding school in Germany, where Monk — barely thirteen at the time — was about to be whipped by an actual monk as part of a punishment. But rather than bending over, he took the offensive and used the religious man’s own weapon to choke him to death. He then set fire to the building, killing 18 sleeping monks inside.
“Since then, each time he’s out to kill someone, they say he makes the sign of a cross. Fucking Psycho!” And sure enough, just as they turn to look at him again, he makes the dreaded sign… and the screen flashes to black.
I don’t want to walk you through the whole movie, but if you love eccentric killers with ambiguous pasts and even more ambiguous motives, you will love watching the introduction of the next 6 characters: Shang, Casino, Blackjack, Poison, Poker, and Detective Stone. Each seems to be vaguely connected to one another, and each happens to find themself at a mysterious mansion at the same time, thanks to cryptic instructions sent to them via letter. Layers of questions surround the coincidental meeting, and armchair detectives will need to pay attention to each subtle detail if they want to stay ahead of the twists. But not too closely, or you’ll lose track of the rapidly-moving plot.
Like, remember that thing about how the Monk character makes the sign of a cross before he kills someone? Seems pretty important, huh? Well he never does it again, even when he’s about to kill someone; this goes to show that a lot of careful thought went into making the characters believable, since real people tend to contradict established plot points and mislead you into thinking certain things are significant, when in fact they are not. Can you tell the wheat from the chaff on the very first viewing?
Other times you’ll find yourself slapping your forehead for missing an obvious clue, such as when the character Blackjack, played by DMX, throws a dart against a dartboard at the end of his introduction scene. This may seem like a meaningless, generic gesture, designed to add punctuation to the moment, but later on this very same dartboard appears in the mystery mansion, begging the question of who had access. Actually, each of them has a personal item in their room, and the movie does us the favour of focusing on this phenomena for a good 7 minutes straight, flashing back and forth to the “hints” so often that simpletons such as myself lose track of what we’re watching. Clearly, a cunning mind is needed to keep pace.
A good representation of what the gang does best. Notice the dartboard in the background.
An extremely delicate sense of hearing is also needed, since Last Hour suffers from some severe audio imbalances. Some parts are muffled, other parts are drowned out, and other times it’s way too loud. Without exaggeration, roughly 30% of the dialogue in this movie is impossible to understand, which is an unfortunate fact considering there is no subtitle option included in the DVD. Even with high-quality speakers turned all the way up, you will be hard pressed to understand a third of what is said in this movie. The other 70% of the dialogue is audible, but has been re-dubbed (due to being originally inaudible, no doubt,) meaning that what characters are saying never seems to match up with what’s on the screen. This takes the viewer out of the scene and makes otherwise serious moments seem farcical. Those who are accustomed to watching French films with English voiceovers may find this acceptable, but this humble reviewer wishes that all of the conversations were audible, considering the dense plot. For such a high-quality movie to have such mangled sound is troubling.
Thankfully, if you’re having trouble understanding things, you’re not alone! This motley crew of badasses are constantly befuddled by their circumstances, and spend the majority of the movie trying to calm each other down and explain things to one another. This is especially true once the lights are turned off, which forces them to cope with darkness on top of everything else. The unconquerable Monk soon decides it would be best to “get some candles, light ‘em up… put them all over the house!” The gang immediately agrees, and the next thing we know they’re walking around with candles in both hands.
Detective Stone, meanwhile, has problems of his own to deal with.
While operating in China (which is where the movie is set) the detective and his partner are confronted by local authorities who insist on interfering with his operation. Even with the mansion surrounded and the criminals locked inside, the C.I.D. butts in and tries to take over the situation, inadvertently giving the gang a hostage in the process. When Detective Stone sarcastically congratulates the C.I.D. commander, he replies with a vicious air quote rebuttal:
"It's called 'Standard Operation Procedure'! This is a hostile situation!"
Not to be confused with comedian Louis C.K., this character is actually played by otherwise-unknown Karl Eiselan, who pretty clearly does not know what the hell he is doing on camera. To say that he throws a wrench into the movie would be an understatement, which is why I feel the need to devote so much space to him. Even the unflappable legend David Carradine struggles to keep a straight face next to Eiselan, barely managing to squeeze out his retort: “Listen, you snot-nosed puppy: I’ve been handling… hostile situations since back when you were still popping your pimples!”
“But you were showing an obvious inability to handle this one!” Eiselan shoots back, looking like a nervous high school student in a class film.
Carradine glances at the camera and puts his hand to his face as he begins his next line. “Well, you know, I could handle it a lot better if you weren’t standing right next to me, hopping from ff… one foot, to another… like a… four year old who has to go to the bathroom!”
As the scene continues I begin to imagine the number of bad takes that must have happened between these two, and the toll it must have taken on David Carradine. Later he will literally forget the name of his rival character, in what seems all too much like a non-scripted outburst that was kept purely for its emotional impact. The fact that Carradine’s caustic lines don’t logically fit at all with Eiselan’s responses is only one of many reasons why this unforgettable scene smells so fishy; although whether it was scripted or not is not for this humble reviewer to decide.
Meanwhile, having apparently placed candles in every area of the mansion, the 6 reputable criminals wander around with lazy curiosity, as harmless tricks are played on them by an unseen prankster, raising tensions. We never see the candles, of course, but we can assume that they’re around because every corridor and room is lit by a dim strobe light, fading in and out hypnotically. Actually, not all areas are lit this way. Background areas are consistently lit with vibrant blue lighting for some reason, as if there are unseen windows letting in a flood of blue daylight. In any case, it certainly adds more mysteries to the story!
As the story steadily rises to its climax, characters begin to vanish and die, creating yet more opportunities for the survivors to practice their highly effective calming techniques. Even when their group has been whittled down to three, thanks to slit throats and trap doors (yes, trap doors!) they overcome anxiety and remain surprisingly casual, proving once and for all that intensity is not needed to make a good Action/Thriller movie. What is needed is for the audience to pay closer attention than ever to the clues.
What clues, you might ask. How about the ones contained within the invitational letters — you know, the ones we are never privy to? Or how about the mysterious numbers that the criminals have tattooed on their bodies? Or what about the strange painting of the six old men known as the “Phantoms”, who are depicted sitting next to the very same sentimental artifacts that our protagonists found in their rooms?
Hidden in this painting are many valuable clues.
Sure, all of these clues are withheld from the audience until this one final scene where they are all revealed and explained at the same time; and sure they only serve to raise more questions rather than answering anything; and sure the final batch of “twists” are stupid enough to make me temporarily drop all pretensions of this being even a halfway fucking decent excuse for a B-film — seriously I feel like smashing the Director’s skull in with a hammer and use it for an ashtray!– but you know what? That’s the mark of a great movie: it makes you feel something.
It keeps you guessing. It has trap doors, strobe light candles, and DMX arbitrarily rubbing the breast of a statue during a heist in a flashback; it has shitty wigs, horrible voice dubbing, and an opening scene with a little girl that never becomes significant again; it has inaudible conversations, no subtitle functions, and enough holes to make a spaghetti strainer jealous. In short, it tries incredibly hard to be cool, but ends up with more ridiculous moments than you begin to count.
Thank you Last Hour. We will not easily forget you.
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