A Última Granada

While THE LAST GRENADE is perhaps the longest 90-minutes you'll ever spend on an action film, it actually needed to be twenty-minutes longer, right up front, since once-good-mercenary-turned-double-crossing Alex Cord is so deadly right off the bat, there's nothing to base things on when former partner Stanley Baker feels so betrayed...

Directed by Gordon Flemyng, the beautiful jungles of Hong Kong China are shown in revealing wide shots, not only to establish the location (when not in the busy city) but to show it off...

Meanwhile Baker and his men, including muscular Andrew Keir, token black Rafer Johnson along with Julian Glover and John Thaw, randomly traipse the jungle where Cord -- like Kurtz from HEART OF DARKNESS made famous later in APOCALYPSE NOW -- has become an eccentric kingpin surrounded by trained Asian foot soldiers...

So while there are some decent action sequences with Baker not only against Cord but the jungle itself, his third-act romance with British general's wife Honor Blackman (married to Richard Attenborough) kills the pace...

Leaving only a miscast Cord... speaking in a bad southern drawl and adorned in ironically mundane attire.. to be killed simply because, well, he's the villain. And Baker isn't.

The problem with The Last Grenade isn't so much that it's bad, but that it disregards audience expectations. It isn't unreasonable, after all, to expect a movie about mercenaries to contain a fair amount of action. The Last Grenade, however, devotes at least as much attention to a none-too-convincing romantic subplot as to the central rivalry between the characters played by Baker and Cord.

Cord's slightly mad villain is more charismatic than the decidedly unheroic hero, but receives too little screen time to keep the tension going. Even his demise is somewhat of a letdown, with the viewer unaccountably robbed of any explosive, bullet-riddled showdown between the rival groups of mercenaries, so that instead we're given an almost mannered climax that's more of a joke than a catharsis, dramatic music cue notwithstanding.

In less British hands - say, Don Siegel's or Sam Peckinpah's - or maybe John Boorman's or David Lean's, this might have been an unqualified winner; as is, however, it's only a minor, watchable, but ultimately disappointing and mostly actionless actioner.

Surely the worst film that any of the three British stars ever made? Any two of them together would normally be enough to suggest a good film, the trio surely a guarantee? And there are several very dependable supporting actors. But all that is commendable about TLG are the locations.

Other reviewers have already expressed various criticisms. Additionally one might mention Baker's team finding Thompson's village deserted and awaiting his gang's return - wandering around in the open and so highly vulnerable.

I suppose that the frustrated Blackman was attracted to Baker because of the combination of his machismo and his vulnerability as a hospital patient? If he had TB, surely it was unwise for her to become intimate with him because the bacteria can be spread through close contact. The romantic interlude halfway through the film was disruptive to the main plot, such as it was.

A very big disappointment.

I have always loved this kind of films made in late sixties and early seventies, downbeat and pessimist topics, speaking of anti heroes battling in combats lost in advance. This is not a masterpiece, but I crave for the charm of those movies. Honor Blackman's awesome character's name is Cathy...I guess a tribute to Cathy Gale, the famous TV show THE AVENGERS that made her a star. To summarize, nothing new, compared to other features of this era, speaking of mercenaries but I will never get tired of them. And there were plenty of those, batches, mostly grade B movies. But who cares?

I saw this movie when it first came out, and it made a BIG impression on me -- because it was so BAD. I remember the ride home listening to my parents in the front seat absolutely trash this thing. There were holes in the plot big enough for a herd of elephants to trample through. My father (normally one of the sweetest men you'll ever meet) worked himself up to the point where he was criticizing the costumes.

As I remember (and it has been 35 years), a platoon is shown heading off into the jungle on a secret mission, and they are all in camouflage, "Except for that idiot," my father exclaims through bursts of laughter, "you know, the guy wearing RED on a secret mission!" And even though I was kind of young, I do remember how wooden the acting was, especially Alex Cord, who had to be one of the worst actors ever.

Bottom line: Good for a few laughs, but there is a reason this one is obscure.