An ageing movie star, woefully unaware of how much the world around him has changed, is given a last chance to relive his former fame when he is given an opportunity to attend a film festival in Nashville where he is the guest of honour. The once-handsome and charismatic Vic Edwards is portrayed by veteran actor Burt Reynolds, lending several scenes in the movie a biographical touch. The movie The Last Movie Star opens with a scene where Edwards, in his heydays, is shown attending an interview in the midst of fawning fans. It abruptly cuts to a scene where a veterinarian advises the present-day actor to put his dog down, a scene that is indicative of the fickleness of fame.
At the advice of his close (and seeming only) friend Sonny (Chevy Chase who plays a Chevy Chase-like character), Edwards decides to attend the film festival, the invitation for which he recently received in his mail. However, to his horror, the event turns out to be nothing more than a behind-the-bar nerdfest organised by a group of young fanboys. He is forced to travel economy class, and provided cramped, broken down living quarters. His assistant Lil (Modern Family's Ariel Winter) is a heavily tattooed, gothic girl that he just can't get along with. Edwards decides to take a trip to Knoxville, his home town, with Lil by his side, and deal with "unfinished business".
Opening with tragi-comic scenes of fame meeting ignominy, the movie soon flounders and descends into kitsch. It thrives on binaries. On the one hand, we have the tattooed, pierced millennial, forever on anxiety medications and trapped in abusive relationships. On the other hand, we have the grandpa, clueless as his younger peers endlessly talk about Twitter, Facebook, Instagrams and hashtags, advising depressed youngsters to "pull up your pants and walk it off".
The sentimentality in the final scenes is overdone, especially when Edwards meets his first wife who suffers from Alzheimer's. In an effort to pull his film out of the barrage of tropes it was predestined to become, the director has attempted to introduce some meta elements—in some scenes, Vic speaks to his younger self, digitally remastered on to some scenes from Burt Reynolds' movies like Smokey and The Bandit. But, that is hardly enough to salvage the wasted opportunity of a film.
Movie: The Last Movie Star
Rating: 2.5/5
Director: Adam Rifkin
Burt Reynolds, Ariel Winter, Chevy Chase, Clark Duke, Ellar Coltrane