Last Flag Flying (2017)
December 10, 2017 2:36 PM - Subscribe
Thirty years after they served together in Vietnam, a former Navy Corpsman Larry "Doc" Shepherd re-unites with his old buddies, former Marines Sal Nealon and Reverend Richard Mueller, to bury his son, a young Marine killed in the Iraq War.
IMDB
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The movie is a sort-of-sequel to The Last Detail, both of them based on novels by Darryl Ponicsan.
IMDB
Rotten Tomatoes
The movie is a sort-of-sequel to The Last Detail, both of them based on novels by Darryl Ponicsan.
I wouldn't be able to say, since the last and only Linklater film that I've seen is Slacker. As a sort-of-sequel to a forty-four-year-old film that, while well-regarded, doesn't get a lot of play any more, its commercial prospects are pretty limited (its gross seems to have tapered off at under a million dollars, even with a stellar leading cast), so maybe somewhere in the middle?
Personally, I think that it's a fine film regardless. The reworking of the characters from The Last Detail works because of the added significance of the incident for which Doc (Steve Carrell's character) ends up doing time. Carrell and Cranston are very good; the former shows a lot more of the same despair that you can see peeking around the edges of his portrayal of Michael Scott on The Office, and Cranston conveys the loneliness of the aging good-time Charlie who's trying to revive the good times one last time. But the real star is Fishburne, who plays the reverend who's found the sort of inner peace that has eluded his old buddies even though he eventually starts cursing a blue streak during their road trip. And the movie avoids sinking too far into the old-dudes-going-out-for-one-last-hurrah cliches by the constant reminders that they're trying to find the meaning in Doc's son's death.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:02 AM on December 13, 2017 [2 favorites]
Personally, I think that it's a fine film regardless. The reworking of the characters from The Last Detail works because of the added significance of the incident for which Doc (Steve Carrell's character) ends up doing time. Carrell and Cranston are very good; the former shows a lot more of the same despair that you can see peeking around the edges of his portrayal of Michael Scott on The Office, and Cranston conveys the loneliness of the aging good-time Charlie who's trying to revive the good times one last time. But the real star is Fishburne, who plays the reverend who's found the sort of inner peace that has eluded his old buddies even though he eventually starts cursing a blue streak during their road trip. And the movie avoids sinking too far into the old-dudes-going-out-for-one-last-hurrah cliches by the constant reminders that they're trying to find the meaning in Doc's son's death.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:02 AM on December 13, 2017 [2 favorites]
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posted by Harvey Kilobit at 1:49 AM on December 13, 2017