Last Boy Scout

THE LAST BOY SCOUT (1991)

The video store, for better or for worse, combined with cinema's reliance on visual, rather than literary, allusion allows an access to a wider range of influences than critics and historians will ever be able to track. Any concept of pretending to know where an artist drew their influences is rendered absurd by the video store and the television set, where Die Hard and Casablanca are equally easily and thoroughly available. So the question of whether Tarantino is a synthesizer or a thief is fired by not only that traditional worry (one every artist must face), but the new dilemma behind it; in a world where all art is equally available, will the individual imagination have the space and the freedom to create for itself? Or will all our artists merely be, at best, gifted synthesizers of previous innovations or, at worst, shameless thieves who create artistic frisson by indiscriminately throwing high and low samples of the art together?

Believe it or not, this is the sort of context from which I predict most people will view The Last Boy Scout. Because if Quentin Tarantino actually does go on to become a significant factor in cinema, people will be looking at the influence of Shane Black on Tarantino's dialogue.

No joke. The movie is some sort of hullabaloo about a burnt out private detective (Bruce Willis) investigating the death of his client, a worried stripper (a pre-divaish Halle Berry), while dealing with her boyfriend, an ex-football hero (Damon Wayans). A brief exchange between Willis and Wayans about the cost of Wayan's leather pants ("Five hundred dollars? Is there a phone built into them or something?") ends up, with a slight bit of noun-changing, in Pulp Fiction as the discussion between Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace about the five dollar milk shake.

The rest of the screenplay, filled with casual obscenity-filled, jokey and mostly pointless dialogue ("You like Prince? I like Prince.") the type that Tarantino would go on to tweak and become his trademark. In Black's case, I suspect that it has less to do with catching the general rhythms of speech and more about lazily keeping the script lively with the latest joke he heard down at the gym, but it still has a vitality and semi-authenticity to it. The Last Boy Scout is pretty mindless, but it has the sort of energy to it (thanks to director Tony Scott's restless editing style and surprisingly good way with actors, as well as Black's enjoyable banter) that one can't help but sort of lazily appreciate. Unless you're Quentin Tarantino, which again brings me to my artsy-fartsy opening. What may well be Tarantino's saving grace (and what everyone is currently pointing to as his downfall) is his ability to realize energy and chemistry where it is, be it in ultra-high art or ultra-low, and try to recreate it. If he succeeds, hang down your heads in woe, future film critics, and expect to have to watch in your seminars not just Bande A Parte, Le Doulos and John Ford films, but also The Last Boy Scout, Zombie Cannibal Holocaust and Smokey and the Bandit.

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