Director: Christian Semsa
82 minutes (15) 2021
101 Films DVD Region 2
Rating: 6/10
Review by Jeff Young
As if he’s being starved of headline roles in studio productions - much like Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis, nowadays - faded Hollywood star of the 1970s Richard Dreyfuss lends his familiar combination of wits and gravitas to lower-budget movies such as the recent feminist manhunt Daughter Of The Wolf. Even on autopilot, his intelligence and intensity remains watchable as Dreyfuss cruise through his seventies. In this likeably atmospheric shoot ’em-up thriller, he plays Murphy, a former military commander and mentor to an ex-soldier and desperate hero.
Every Last One Of Them starts with a bar-room brawl centred on the stranger in town, a serious tough guy from Vegas, Jake Hunter (Paul Sloan, Stiletto), who quickly escapes from custody, and steals a police car to continue searching for his missing daughter. Of course, he’s driven to become a proverbial one-man army, clearly following the subgenre trend established by Rambo, Commando, and Taken, along with other such exploitation-cinema inspirations.
Chief villains here are Nichols (Jake Weber, Those Who Want Me Dead), and his weirdly-psycho sister Maggie (Taryn Manning, Hawaii Five-0 remake), who are the main targets for Jake’s instinctive suspicions and unstoppable wrath. In pursuit of local justice, sheriff Kim (Mary Christina Brown) is firmly, if not formally, on hero Jake’s side. Michael Madsen does his usual character-actor stuff in a minor supporting role.
ELOOT delivers a grim & moody build-up to its standard revenger plot, with extra layers of intrigue that expose county political corruption. Christian Sesma, maker of Vigilante Diaries, Mind Blown, and Take Back, directs with an eye for sleazy imagery and messily violent details. With its haunting tragedy already done, and then revealed in flashbacks, what’s most important here is the headlong chase towards a gun-point reckoning of quasi-operatic terrorism, bolstered by a suitably noisy music score, before some bloody do-or-die retribution.
Despite working under pandemic constraints and often being limited by filming back-yard scenery, there’s plenty of technical and twisty-narrative evidence here that resourceful Semsa keeps on improvising as a slick B-movie stylist, if never quite a genuine auteur, balancing cool and cruel characters and many action-packed sequences, with each new effort.
