Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
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.
The Last Boy Scout is a slick, entertaining Shane Black buddy-action thriller that leans hard into his trademark cynical wisecracks and hard-boiled tone. The plot is serviceable but fairly convoluted — a web of football corruption, bribery, and murder that works well enough as a vehicle for the banter and action. Willis and Wayans have decent chemistry, though neither is doing career-best work here. Cinematography is competent genre fare, nothing distinctive. Novelty is limited — while Shane Black's voice is present, this follows his established template closely (cf. Lethal Weapon) and doesn't break new ground even within his own filmography. The ending is a crowd-pleasing rooftop showdown that resolves everything tidily if unspectacularly.