“Strozzi told me he had her sent down here to keep up his morale… that’s the first time I ever heard it called that.”

In Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing, Bruce Willis plays a man who, in his own words, was born without a conscience. Drifting into a scraggly old Prohibition era Texas bordertown à la Toshiro Mifune’s rōnin in Yojimbo (the film acknowledges Akira Kurosawa and Ryūzō Kikushima in the credits), Willis’ anonymous gunslinger quickly finds himself playing both sides in a local mob war between rival gangs of Irish and Italian bootleggers. Almost all of the principals play characters derived from the original film, including the craven lawman (Bruce Dern), the hotelier (William Sanderson, previewing his role as E.B. Farnum in Deadwood), the intimidating heavy (Christopher Walken), and the bosses (David Patrick Kelly and Ned Eisenberg). In this decidedly unreal locale—a wild amalgamation of a dust bowl town and a 1920s city, where you can count the non-gangsters on one hand even if it’s missing a couple fingers—Walter Hill does his best to offer a straightforward procession of raspy hardboiled dialogue, machismo, and John Woo gunplay. Hill can conjure up kinetic action while bound and blindfolded, as he has proven time and again. Regrettably, he’s missing a crucial ingredient here. To wit, unlike the wily samurai in Kurosawa’s prototype, or Clint Eastwood’s laconic Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, Willis’ monosyllabic tough guy lacks not just a conscience, but personality as well, rendering the surplus of shootouts and snide commentary surprisingly drab and humorless. I’d chalk this one up as a waste of a good Ry Cooder score, and point the finger at Hill’s shortcomings as a scenarist and a surfeit of marginally parodic voiceover narration.