Just tonight I watched "The Last Thing He Wanted" with my family -- two younger siblings (16 and 18) and my mom (60). All four of us loved it. We were all talking happily about it after it was done. I had heard vaguely that it was getting bad reviews, but I hadn't actually read any. Now I'm on IMDb and I'm seeing all these one star reviews. I decided to make an account just to give my own opinion.
This movie is hard to follow. That's something everyone here is mentioning. But it seems to me like it wasn't THAT hard to follow. It's only about as convoluted as "The Big Sleep" or "Funeral in Berlin," which don't have rock bottom ratings.
That makes me think that this film just hasn't found its audience. I think a lot of people came here looking for action scenes, and got bored with this mainly dialogue driven movie (which was adapted from a novel). I found the movie very tense and thrilling throughout, so that the action scenes came as exciting escalations of the ever-present tension. But if the dialogue is not hooking you, you probably won't be feeling the tension much in the first place.
And the dialogue is a big thing. I have no doubt I wouldn't have been able to make sense of the movies without having the subtitles on. The characters talk fast and reference a lot of names (of places, people, and organizations). It expects you to keep up with this rapid fire pace. To be fair, this is just one of the pitfalls of adapting a novel. There are so many words, and if the actors spoke more slowly they'd never be able to fit the whole story in one movie.
I think the pacing was truly admirable. Most novel adaptations either have dumb time-skips where you miss important information, or have summary-style scenes where all the interesting dialogue is cut out to leave the plot-relevant information, or have scenes that plod on much longer than they should. "The Last Thing He Wanted" goes at a clip, really rushing from thing to thing. But each point is actually made very well in each scene, and the rush of it becomes pretty exciting. You have no time to stop and think while your life is at risk, and you have no idea who to trust. This ends up demanding a lot of focus from the viewer. I think my family enjoyed it so much because we saw it as kind of a game. We pointed things out to each other and tried to make connections between things.
I can understand reviewers who were unpleasantly surprised to find that there isn't much action here, and that the fast-paced dialogue requires a lot of concentration. That isn't everyone's cup of tea. But I also get the sneaking suspicion that people are just frustrated that this movie doesn't spell everything out about the historical background. It frustrates me because the historical background is one of the most urgent things about the movie.
Some movies will start with the ABCs because they know their audience doesn't know much about the subject matter. For instance, movies like "Hotel Rwanda" are like an introduction to their subject matter. It doesn't assume that you know very much about the Rwandan genocide. It wants to tell you about it.
But if you're always starting from basics, you never get anywhere. Sometimes there are important things to say AFTER you've learned all the basics. That's the kind of movie "The Last Thing He Wanted" is. It expects you to have some familiarity with the political background.
And believe me, you should WANT to know more about the political background. Because this stuff is the background of our own lives today. This movie is basically about how America behaves as a superpower -- how it acts at home and how it treats other countries around the world. The way it acts today is not much different. If you try to learn a bit about the background and then keep that in mind while you watch this movies, YOU WILL LEARN SO MUCH THAT IS SO IMPORTANT! Of course, I can't guarantee that you'll like it. But this information is valuable in its own right.
Basically, the backdrop for this movie is the Reagan administration's involvement in Central America and the Caribbean. The Cold War was still on, and a group of left-wing Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua. Reagan opposed this government and backed anti-Sandinista "Contras". He supplied these Contras with arms and funding, and also spoke out publicly in their favour. The problem is that the Contras, to quote Wikipedia, "engaged in a systematic campaign of terror" -- these were not just freedom-loving citizens who opposed leftism, but brutal armies. At the same time, the US government was getting involved in similar ways in El Salvador, Grenada (a Caribbean island), and many other places across the world.
Besides the moral problems associated with backing the Contras, there were also the nefarious ways that the government did it. It was not by any means a straight-forward affair -- the CIA and other government agencies acted in almost total secrecy, and a lot of shady dealing got mixed in with the declared actions the Reagan administration was taking.
This is the central dynamic of "The Last Thing He Wanted." The shady backroom stuff can't be disentangled from what the government is officially doing. Anne Hathaway's character, Elena, is a journalist who documents the things that the government wants kept secret. Early on in the movie, Ben Affleck's character debates with another Washington guy about whether or not to "allow" her to keep doing her journalism there. The other guy thinks it will help to make things seem more unstable in Nicaragua, and thus give legitimacy to American operations there. Affleck's character, Treat, thinks it's too risky to have the truth come out.
The question hanging over the whole film is, who is out to get who? When Elena (Hathaway) starts to get involved in her father's smuggling operation, she doesn't know who is connected to the Sandinistas, who is connected to the Contras, who is perhaps only trying to make money off of drugs, and who is connected to the US government. For people connected to the US government, we have to wonder, do they know Elena is a journalist and care about that, or is she only relevant because of the smuggling thing?
Basically, everyone's motives are completely tied up with the political situation at the time. But, let's be real, the world hasn't changed that much. It's exactly the kind of high-handed treatment of other countries which are, in theory anyway, sovereign, which makes China, Russia, and other countries so recalcitrant about accepting US leadership. If this is how the US treats Nicaragua, why wouldn't they treat China the same way?
It's also the same attitude which led to the (second) Iraq war. Now, I need hardly remind you that the Iraq war is a huge reason why people are so jaded about politics today. People were lied to on a massive scale, and bought into a costly and painful war over what turns out to have been nothing important. It has given both Republicans and Democrats a sense of powerlessness and cynicism (one of the things which helped elect Trump). Moreover, American prestige has never recovered, and the international well of goodwill for America has become very shallow.
Well, that's my little history lesson (and I don't claim to be an expert on any of this stuff). But it gets to the heart of what matters today. The world still works the way it does in "The Last Thing He Wanted," and unlike a movie, you can't just give it one star and tune it out.
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