The Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)

Watched 5/19/24 (VOD)

An entertainingly volatile, tonally uneven, and underdeveloped crime thriller, Last Stop in Yuma County wants badly to be Quentin Tarantino or Elmore Leonard but never quite survives its jarring shifts and sometimes-inauthentic dialogue to be something as copacetic as its inspirations. It’s a valiant effort in nasty, unpredictable storytelling, but doesn’t quite flex enough character muscle to be a truly satisfying experience. Some overindulgent music choices and unsavory, unearned swerves derail some of the good momentum built up through the well-directed tension. But at 90 minutes, it’s hard to deny as a let’s-see-what-happens experience, even if it sometimes sputters like a car running out of gas.

The plot concerns just that. A gas stop that has no gas—and a group of diverse customers waiting on the gas supply truck to arrive with salvation. The next stop isn’t for 200 miles, and almost everyone seems to be out of fuel.

A nextdoor diner serves as the single location for a very good ensemble to assemble. And it’s all laid out from the beginning as to who’s who. Jim Cummings of Thunder Road mini-fame plays a traveling cutlery salesman, not allowed to be quite as Jim Cummings-y as he probably could have been, but still quite believable. Richard Brake cast as a bank robber predictably nails his part along with a wonderfully bizarro accomplice played by the new-to-me Nicholas Logan, a real highlight of nervous, fiery energy. Jocelin Donahue, who seemingly disappeared for the last 15 years after Ti West’s effective House of the Devil, makes a welcome return to the slow-burn potboiler genre here as the diner’s owner and operator. Would certainly like to see her in more—she’s great here.

And then there’s a who’s who of other beloved character actors with smaller roles. An old couple with Coen Bros’ vet Gene Jones serving as the husband. The gas station owner played by Elf and Made’s finest, Faizon Love. A couple dorky cops played by Michael Abbott Jr. and Connor Paolo. And finally Jon Proudstar shows up shortly after Bonnie and Clyde stand-ins Sierra McCormick and Ryan Masson. 

The actors are all great—not a single performance hits an unbelievable note outside of a few overwritten lines, which of course are not the actors’ faults. They all live and breathe their characters. The bigger problem stems from unwise character deaths and a lack of audience attachment by the time the movie picks a final act direction. It’s a strange direction that ties up appropriately enough, but lacks the connection we feel to certain characters in the first couple acts, with extended sequences of nicely-executed anxiety putting us in the skin of some people more than others. 

It’s not that the movie is slow in the final act. It’s fascinating to see where it decides to go. But the choices that are made to get there just don’t make a ton of sense. It certainly is not an audience-friendly film. And while Quentin Tarantino has made a career on sick characters, overindulgent dialogue, and brutal punishment via guns and knives, this impersonator forgets to target character above all else. While QT latches you onto characters from the start, Yuma County writer/director Francis Galluppi is seemingly content with employing just the (less credible here) colorful dialogue and flashy violence. It often strains in the dialogue department, and the action set pieces, while well-executed from a directorial standpoint, just really don’t end in a way that makes you feel much of anything. When the dust settles, you’re left following characters who are hard to care about, lacking in depth and being asked to shift tones in ways that just aren’t set up nearly enough to work.

This is a decent, sometimes funny, sometimes oddly serious film about a compelling series of crimes, but it’s not much else. The details come apart in your hands as you try to grab ahold of them, and much like many of the characters after the bullets fly, the movie contains some hollowness that is just tough to get past. I think Mr. Galluppi is going after an Evil Dead movie next? I’ll watch that. He showed here he’s good with making killing cinematic and that’s what the Evil Dead franchise demands.

6.25/10