Broderick and Baldwin make the best of a shaky 'Last Shot'

Friday, September 24, 2004

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Alec Baldwin and Matthew Broderick make such a good team and first-time director Jeff Nathanson has such a strong track record as a writer (two Spielberg movies) that one would suspect that their comedy collaboration, "The Last Shot," would be one of the delights of the movie fall.

MOVIE REVIEW

THE LAST SHOT

DIRECTOR: Jeff Nathanson

CAST: Matthew Broderick, Alec Baldwin, Toni Collette

RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes

RATING: R for language and some sexual content

WHERE: Meridian 16

GRADE: C

Sadly, it's not. Nathanson never quite finds the right comic groove or the credibility that even a wild satire needs to function properly, and he's loaded the movie with so much adolescent crudity that there's precious little room left for anything else, including wit.

It's essentially a rip-off of "The Producers," based (very loosely), its publicity claims, on a real incident in the '80s in which the FBI set up a phony movie project as a sting operation to break Mafia control of a Rhode Island Teamsters local.

Baldwin plays a hapless FBI agent -- such a loser that his dog has just committed suicide -- who gets the brilliant idea of the movie sting and goes off to Hollywood to learn something about the producing business and recruit himself a filmmaker stooge.

Broderick is the fool he finds: an aspiring writer/director with a script called "Arizona." The fake-producer offers to finance it but -- and this is the big joke of the movie -- they have to film it in Providence, R.I., disguised as the Southwest.

As they set about this dubious task -- and the FBI becomes seduced by the glamour of the filmmaking process -- there are some funny moments. Baldwin and Broderick each click in their roles and consistently rise above their material in every scene.

But the movie around them falls flat and can't begin to sustain its premise. Great show-biz satires such as "The Player" tend to work because beneath all their absurdity is a foundation of believability. But disguising downtown Providence as the Grand Canyon?

Nathanson, who wrote "Catch Me If You Can" and "The Terminal," also has deserted the relative sophistication of those films for a flood of bathroom humor and crude sex jokes. It's hugely out of the context of the characters and their milieu, and not at all his artistic forte.