Metacritic reviews

The Last Boy Scout is a guilty pleasure by any standard, but I’ve seen plenty of guilt-free movies lately that aren’t this much fun.

The Last Boy Scout is a superb example of what it is: a glossy, skillful, cynical, smart, utterly corrupt and vilely misogynistic action thriller. To give it a negative review would be dishonest, because it is such a skillful and well-crafted movie.

This is a movie for the boys who like watching men being real men - cursing, shooting and fighting - and anyone who likes this kind of wham-bam entertainment will certainly get more than their money's worth.

Mr. Scott directs the film as if he were trying to win a prize for demolishing a building in record time. The opening is good: stylish video images of a night football game played in a torrential rain, climaxed by the only scene in the film that has legitimate shock. After that, the brutality and the pace don't slacken, but interest does.

Despite the testosterone-charged violence and jaw-dropping sexism, the tone is one of self-conscious excess - a strategy which constantly undercuts the film's celebration of male bonding conventions.

The story is beholden to the trendy steroid-and-TV world view: pump it up and cut it fast. Still, the dialogue, while fitfully glib, is wry and engaging, like a profane Raymond Chandler on speed. No one acts (in the Stanislavsky sense, anyway) but all perform well.

There’s really nothing special about this entertaining if mindless shoot-’em-up other than an ample supply of amusing juvenile put-downs and elaborate action sequences.

Producer Joel Silver and Willis keep trying to remake Die Hard. This time they call in Top Gun director Scott. The result is mildly interesting, but there are so many weird and gratuitous scenes of insane violence that the effect is drained of impact.

A Roman circus of guts, glory and gallows humor, this lavish action thriller should sate the genre's increasingly bloodthirsty audience. Like the evening news, it fairly hemorrhages blood and sorrow.

It's a kill movie, the filmic equivalent of a hate crime.