EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM
US, 2021, 82 minutes, Colour.
Paul Sloan, Jake Weber, Taryn Manning, Richard Dreyfuss, Michael Madsen, Mike Hatton, Mary Christina Brown, Claire Kniaz, Hudson Garland, Brian Hayes Currie.
Directed by Christian Sesme.
There is an opening quotation about vengeance. And, with the title, it is clear that this is a small budget, brief American action film focusing on vengeance. Paul Sloan plays a father who is in search of his daughter. He has a mysterious action background, keeping him from home, alienating him from his daughter. He entrusts her to a friend, Michael Madsen, but she leaves and is out of control.
The film opens with the determined hero, walking into a town, going into a bar, getting into a fight, taken by the town boss, interrogated by the police and to find the surest sympathetic and letting him go.
The film offers the background to the town, the financial boss, played by Jake Weber and his powerful sister, Taryn Manning. At the core of the disappearance of the young woman is his son, played by Hudson Garland, an addict, disreputable, his father’s tough bodyguards keeping an eye on him. Eventually, we realise that the daughter died in his company, overdose, but not quite dying and buried in the mansion lake by the father.
There is lots of action, fights, confrontations, an inveterate hero, overcoming wounds and defeat, outwitting his pursuers, eliminating them. However, he respects the town sheriff, Mary Christina Brown, and her deputy.
Meanwhile, in the background, half financial deals going on in the town, the purchase of land from Native Americans who agree, a vast amount of water underlying it, waiting for state affirmation which has been promised.
Also in the background and then to the foreground is Richard Dreyfuss is a as a veteran CIA manager, trying to keep control of the avenger as well as the town boss and the manager of the financial deals. It all comes to a head – in violence, especially through Richard Dreyfuss.
(This is the kind of action film that one might expect to have grows Willis in it, the many, many films he made over the 2010 is and into the 2020s – he could have been the Richard Dreyfuss role!)
