Review-The Last Stop in Yuma County
A debut feature that feels like an extended short film.
I fell terribly behind on my reviewed lately, but I was finally able to catch up with the second of my reviews based on recommendations I received from my note requesting movies to watch. This time we have a recommendation from
over at . If you’re looking for more movie reviews (old and new just like here at The Oscar Project) along with other great movie content, give him a follow.I hadn’t heard anything about this film so came into it completely blind. The story is that of a remote diner/gas station in Yuma County, Arizona. It is a single day of events film, which I appreciate, starting with the arrival of the diner’s waitress Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue) alongside an anonymous travelling knife salesman (Jim Cummings). The wrench in the works is that the gas truck sent to fill up the station’s tanks is running late. The knife salesman sits down for a bite to eat to wait for the truck and before long, a pair of men (Nicholas Logan and Richard Brake in rare form) arrive driving a car connected with a recent bank robbery. The salesman and the waitress figure out who they are, and agree not to say anything in exchange for their lives. What they all don’t know, but we the audience do, is that the truck is never coming after crashing on its way there that morning.
This setup seems like enough of a pressure cooker (literally as well since the A/C is broken) but several other people show up to the diner throughout the morning, including the local sheriff’s deputy. As expected, all hell eventually breaks loose.
Unfortunately for a film with such a great premise and setup, it fails to deliver. The acting is just ok, but the standout is Brake as the older of the two bank robbers. He is smart and calculating, and incredibly observant about what is going on around the diner. He’s the smartest man in the room, but ultimately gets overwhelmed by the odds of too many people to predict.
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