“The Last Front” is a first-rate calling-card movie—a medium-budget project that feels much bigger because it puts all the money on the screen, as studio executives like to say, and that will make people want to trust first-time director Julien Hayet-Kerknawi with bigger budgets moving forward. But it seems more likely that it’ll be a Dwayne Johnson action thriller than a historical drama is somewhat troubling considering the subject matter of the film: the attempts to liberate a small Belgian farming community from German troops who’ve occupied it during World War I, and the unrelenting cruelty that invading soldiers inflict on civilian populations under the guise of carrying out orders.
The two main characters are Leonard Lambert (Iain Glen)—a soft-spoken widower who lives on a farm with his daughter Johanna (Emma Dupont) and his son Adrien (James Downie)—and a German army officer, Lt. Laurentz (Joe Anderson). On top of his obvious psychological problems (including psychosis, a hair-trigger temper, and alcoholism), Laurentz is a world-class scumbag villain, the kind you spend an entire movie rooting for somebody to murder as gruesomely as possible.
This is not a shades-of-grey kind of movie. Nor is it one where the characters have more than two dimensions or the hint of a personal life beyond their immediate plot function. Lambert is, it appears, a committed pacifist who would rather avoid confrontation than participate in it (his last name begins with “Lamb” after all). At the same time, Laurentz is so detestable and chaotic that his superior officer and actual dad, Commander Maximilian (Philippe Brenninkmeyer), calls him a monster and briefly ends up having the lad’s pistol pointed at his forehead. The rest of the characters—including Adrien’s girlfriend Louise (Sasha Luss) and her father, Dr. Janssen (Koen De Bouw), and the parish priest Father Michael (David Calder)—are mainly there to create suspense as to whether they’ll be tormented or murdered by Laurentz, whose solution to every problem is to reach for his gun. (Gotta hand it to the guy: he’s not big on delegating. He personally kills so many people in this movie that you start to wonder why he brought those other guys with him.)
The violence is circumscribed, usually showing you just enough gore and/or pain to get across the idea that war is indeed hell (though the goopy sound effects and screams fill in the blanks as far as horrors-of-war). But the more “The Last Front” seems to want to speak seriously to the inhumanity of wartime, the less I was inclined to trust it because it traffics in the visual and aural language of the red-meat revenge thriller. At many points, connoisseurs of action cinema may be reminded of films starring and/or directed by Mel Gibson, such as “The Patriot,” “Braveheart,” and “Hacksaw Ridge” that genuflect toward some kind of larger statement about a certain historical period but end up being functionally indistinguishable from a 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone picture where one man can become an army.
Considering that other villagers almost immediately start suggesting that Lambert is the perfect guy to lead a rebellion against the Germans—plus the fact that Glen is best known for spending eight seasons on “Game of Thrones” playing the only thoughtful guy in a room full of petty, bloodthirsty maniacs, then dutifully kicking butt, often on horseback—it’s mystifying that the film spends to much time letting us watch the poor man do the “to be or not to be” thing. Why not skip to the part where he takes up arms against a sea of troubles? This is not a psychodrama–there’s not a whole lot of “psych” to dramatize–so there’s no reason to delay the inevitable scenes of Lambert going full John Wayne on the Huns.
There are compensatory pleasures. The supporting performances are above and beyond, and Glen is so likable and so believable as a decent man pushed too far that if this film does well, he might be in line to have a late-in-life career renaissance in another of the butt-kicking, R-rated senior citizen franchises that have become ubiquitous. The cinematography by Xavier Van D’huynslager puts the widescreen format to excellent use in presenting information and blocking large numbers of people, something too many contemporary filmmakers no longer seem to know how to do. The action sequences are lean and clean; you know what’s happening, what’s at stake, and why things turned out as they did. Frederik Van de Moortel’s score is fundamentally honest in that it’s more “’80s action thriller” than “Oh, the humanity!” It’s superb at escalating tension in the lead-up to violence, and there’s a brilliant moment in the second half where he introduces what sounds like distorted and truncated feedback loops, as if to suggest that the character the scene is focused on is losing his grip on reality.
If Liam Neeson ever wants to get back into the “Taken” business, he could save time by hiring this entire team, including Glen as the hero’s previously unmentioned cousin Nigel, who used to work for MI-6. I don’t know if that’s the impression the filmmakers wanted to leave, but that’s what comes across.
