The Last Stop in Yuma County
[info headline="Release date"]7 December 2018[/info]
[info headline="Language"]English, Hindi[/info]
[info headline="IMDb Rating"]7.4[/info]
[info headline="Genre"]Action, Fantasy, Science Fiction[/info]
[info headline="Cast"]truong van, nhu y, vo phuoc[/info]
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"Last Stop in Yuma County" is the kind of movie
where you root for the worst to happen, because every escalation of misfortune
makes things more entertaining.
Written and directed by Francis Galluppi, "Yuma"
is a period piece that makes the most of a small budget. It's set in the
Arizona desert, roughly fifty years ago. Much of the action occurs in and
around a diner and its adjacent gas station. The owner, a lumbering but
sweet-souled man named Vernon (Faizon Love), tells travelers that the next
station is four hours away, so it behooves them to fill up while they can. But
the pumps are empty, and the fuel truck is behind schedule, so anyone who doesn't
have enough gas in the tank to keep going must sit in the diner and wait. The
central air isn't working. The place is a hotbox. Tempers tend to flare in a
place like this.
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Our entry into the story is a knife salesman, listed in the
credits simply as The Knife Salesman (Jim Cummings). He seems anxious and
depressed before he's even opened his mouth. He wants to get to Calabasas,
California, to visit his daughter, who is living with her mom and mom's second
husband. His waitress is Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), a smart, sweet lady who
keeps urging patrons to try the rhubarb pie. Charlotte is married to Sheriff
Charlie (Michael Abbott Jr.), who dropped her off at work that morning.
The Knife Salesman and Charlotte bond immediately, but their
conversation is interrupted by the arrival of two more customers, Travis and
Beau (Richard Brake and Nicolas Logan), perpetrators of a bank robbery that's
all over the news. They're surly and menacing. They stare. Sometimes they
glower. Travis is smug and cold and has an insinuating, at times invasive way
of speaking. Beau is an impulsive meathead who chain-smokes and wipes his
armpits with napkins. Eventually, somebody's going to identify these two.
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As "Yuma" goes along, it adds more characters and
... what's the word I'm looking for here? Not levels. The movie stays at one
level (thumbscrew-tightening comedy-thriller), and that's fine because few
American films know how to operate that way, and it's a treat to see one that
does. Maybe "trajectories" is the word. All these characters are
going somewhere, if only in their minds. Their pit stop at the diner interrupts
their momentum, then traps them in a limbo that becomes a purgatory and
ultimately a hell on earth. (The movie could've been titled "The Fuelman
Cometh.")
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There's an old married couple with a wife (Robin Bartlett)
who knits and a husband (Gene Jones) who shoehorns his way into other diners'
mental space when he isn't snoring at the table. Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil
(Sierra McCormick), younger criminals who fancy themselves the next Bonnie and
Clyde, end up in the diner as well. Everyone in the place has a weapon of some
kind. This is not the kind of movie that will end with hugging.
Galluppi, who also edited, has clearly studied the collected
works of the Coen Bros and Sam Raimi and absorbed a lot (including a repertory
company member: Gene Jones was in "No Country for Old Men"). After
seeing "Yuma County," you'll understand how Galluppi went immediately
from this, his feature debut, to writing and directing an "Evil Dead"
movie based on an original idea he pitched to Raimi.
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"Yuma County" is descended from the 1980s and '90s
gritty American crime flick subgenre that included the Coens' "Blood
Simple" and "Fargo" and Raimi's "The Gift" and "A
Simple Plan"—movies that made you laugh, then cut the laughter short with
spectacular violence, then made you laugh again by having the characters
continue to be their worst selves even as they bled out. ("Are we
square?" Steve Buscemi's kidnapper grimace-growls in "Fargo," holding a blood-soaked
rag against the gunshot wound in his face.)
Good as it is, you might wish the movie were better, or
there was a bit more to it, all the way up to the last act. For an instant, it
seems as if the movie has crested prematurely or run out of ideas when there
are another 30 minutes to go. Then it takes a left turn into the kind of
gloriously desperate black-hearted comedy that defines a cult classic. Cummings
is at the center of this final act, and he's the perfect anchor: he brings a
tamped-down variant of the hyper-verbal weasel persona he displayed in 2021’s
"The Beta Test," a black comedy about a morally vacuous Hollywood
agent who suffered greatly for his numerous sins but was too arrogant to learn
and grow. Cummings is conventionally handsome in a way that would have been
standard-issue Anglo suburbanite in the 1950s but seems unreal and unnerving
today. It's a face from an ad for black-and-white televisions. His very
existence is satirical.
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