Mark Reviews Movies: LAST LOOKS

Last Looks, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 3, 2022

The mystery of a detective yarn is, in some ways, irrelevant to that story's success. Take the central puzzle of Last Looks, in which a famous actor's wife has been murdered, everyone assumes the husband is the killer, and just about the same number of people figure he'll get away with the crime, because that's the nature of celebrity and the money it brings. It's a fine-enough mystery, with a couple of complications and pieces of misdirection, but more intriguing than the ultimate identity of the murderer is what the process of solving the crime shows us about fame and the cold bottom line of the entertainment business.

This is nothing new, obviously, so yes, Howard Michael Gould's screenplay (based on his novel) definitely suffers a bit from being overly familiar, on-the-nose, and too caught up in plotting to really dig into its Hollywood personalities and politics. There's another element, though, that almost rescues it.

If the mystery of a detective yarn is less important than the deeper things that story reveals, somewhere in between those two components in terms of significance. That's the detective, and in this tale, Gould has invented a pretty notable one, who's surely more interesting than the winding and weaving plot in which he finds himself caught.

In the way he's completely separate from the money and the gossip and the inflated egos of Hollywood, our investigating man also serves as stark contrast to the excesses of the players and the industry he's dissecting. Indeed, there's so much promise in the character of Charlie Waldo (Charlie Hunnam), a morally upright but seemingly out-of-the-loop and out-of-his-league detective, that the protagonist carries this material further than it might have gone otherwise.

Charlie once was a police detective in Los Angeles, but for a few years now, he has been living out of a trailer on a large patch of uninhabited land. He has reduced his life to 100 possessions, including one set of clothes, a trilby (He is a detective, after all), a laptop, a phone he keeps turned off, and a chicken that provides him his diet of eggs. This minimalist existence is an environmentalist move, to be sure, but Charlie also has a good reason to be away from people and his former profession. Basically, he made a mistake, tried and failed to correct it, and caught a lot of heat for calling out the systemic issues of his police department.

This makes him an ideal candidate to investigate the murder of the wife of actor Alastair Pinch (Mel Gibson). That, at least, is the thinking of his ex-flame Lorena (Morena Baccarin), a private investigator, who has volunteered Charlie for the job. See, Alastair is an alcoholic, and on the night of his wife's death, he was black-out drunk. Wilson (Rupert Friend), the head of the company that produces the TV show in which the actor stars, wants to know the truth—and the good publicity of looking as if the studio actually cares.

Complicating matters is that Alastair genuinely doesn't know if he's the person who killed his wife. Plus, Lorena goes missing, having gotten on the wrong side of "recreational pharmacologist" Don Q (Jacob Scipio), who is convinced she left something with Charlie and starts causing the detective some trouble.

The main joke, of course, is that Charlie is an outsider—not only to the ways of Hollywood now, but also to what people presume to be the basics of everyday living. He has to ride his bike from his trailer to the bus depot in a nearby town, and then, he rides his bike just about everywhere during his investigation, which makes it amusingly apparent when someone in a car is trailing him and provides quite a chuckle when the climax requires him to chase a suspect in a car. It's a good gag, but the key to character's success is that Gould, director Tim Kirkby, and Hannam don't treat Charlie as a joke.

He feels like the last or only decent and honest person in a place like this, where Alastair is either incredibly guilty or unknowingly innocent, and it doesn't matter either way. Wilson wants to keep the show, where the British actor plays a Southern judge, going into syndication, and the murder accusation is good advertising. Since the cops hate Charlie for what he revealed about the system, they don't even bother with a thorough investigation to get the job done before him. Corruption and secrets are everywhere, all the way from the top of powerful places to, potentially, a pretty teacher (played by Lucy Fry), who admits to knowing more than she's willing to tell Charlie.

Hunnam's laid-back performance serves as a grounded juxtaposition to the sinister implications of the material, as well as the overwhelming number of threads wrapping around each other in a plot populated with red herrings (There are a lot of glorified cameos here from the likes of Dominic Monaghan, Clancy Brown, Cliff Smith, and Robin Givens). The actor is quite good here, as a fundamentally good man with a sharp mind, some haunting regret, and first-hand knowledge of what people are willing to do to each other for selfish ends.

That makes Charlie a fascinating and inherently sympathetic figure. He's surely the best thing about Last Looks, which allows a formulaic mystery to overshadow its more appealing elements.

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