Review: The Last Movie Star

The Last Movie Star...I didn't know quite what to expect when I queued this up on Amazon Prime last weekend.

Burt Reynolds hit it big in the movies with his role in Deliverance. Although he got his start in the late 1950s with roles on dramatic TV series, he didn't follow up his critically acclaimed performance in Deliverance with more dramatic roles.

He picked crowd-pleasing, commercially successful films like Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run.

When he did choose a dramatic role, his humor was in evidence too even though sometimes, it was a darker kind of humor. I'm thinking of The Longest Yard which was far superior to the remake. (Apologies to Adam Sandler.) For years, Reynolds in The Longest Yard was shown on Super Bowl Sunday.

Late in his career, he tried making different choices in films such as Boogie Nights for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. However, the film business had passed him by. The late 1990s found him with another failed relationship and bankruptcy.

I tell you all this because the movie more or less follows his personal and professional life rather closely.

The Last Movie Star

Burt Reynolds is like Vic Edwards, the title character in the movie. He's an aging former movie star forced to face the reality that his glory days are behind him. He's running out of money and running out of time.

At first glance, the movie is about fading glory, but beneath the "once I was famous but now life sucks" surface, it's what all of us must face about aging.

Growing old in this country is becoming invisible...irrelevant. For a movie star, growing old is career ending--unless you want to endorse pharmaceuticals or do infomercials or take on roles that are cringe-worthy.

Reynolds, like the Edwards character in the movie, was a college football star who parlayed that into film roles. He made it big but lost the love of his life along the way.

My 2¢

The film is poignant, funny, dramatic, and painful. Vic Edwards learns some much needed home truths.

Despite what he thinks, there are people who fondly remember his contributions in college and the delight they found in his films even though he thinks they were mostly crap.

He learns one must reach out to others in order to have more life in his life.

Lil, the social media obsessed young woman (superbly played by Ariel Winter) who is his driver learns a lot too with the actor  impressing upon her the way a man should treat a woman--something he learned the hard way.

All in all, this is definitely a star-turn of a role and seems to have opened doors for Reynolds. I understand he's to be in Tarentino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Takeaway Truth

If you have Amazon Prime, by all means watch this. You can also rent it from Amazon. His role was critically acclaimed, and this movie is something you'll want to discuss with other movie geeks.