Last Man Standing

Bruce Willis engages in a dangerous game of deception and double-cross as he takes on rival bootlegging mobs to pull off the ultimate con in New Line Cinema's Last Man Standing. Bruce Dern, Christopher Walken, William Sanderson and Karina Lombard co-star in this action-driven, gangland thriller written and directed by Walter Hill and produced by Arthur Sarkissian.

THE STORY

Bruce Willis is 'Smith'

With its unpaved streets and rickety buildings, Jericho, Texas is an unlikely outpost for gun-toting mobs from Chicago. But with Prohibition in full swing, tweed-suited rum-runners have corrupted and terrorized this sleepy border town. Civil law is dead. Like their bosses in the Windy City, the fierce leaders of Jericho's rival crime families are warring for control of a lucrative bounty of booze: truckloads of 100-proof, making their way from Mexico to a thirsty nation's illicit network of gin joints and speakeasies.

Fatefully, a mysterious loner (Willis) passes through this besieged town looking for a place to spend the night. Calling himself Smith, the rugged drifter is polite, cynical and elusive; perhaps too cynical for the intimidating welcoming committee that vandalizes his car and tells him to look elsewhere for a place to rest.

When the crooked local sheriff (Dern) warns the stranger not to count on anyone for help, Smith takes the law into his own hands. In a daring assault on the gang's headquarters, he riddles the place with bullets and kills a top gunman. The mob is stunned by this brazen attack. But before they can retaliate, the rival gang offers Smith a job. They could use a kamikaze gunslinger, and they'll pay him handsomely.

With a pervasive bootlegging war choking the life from this nearly extinct ghost town, Smith decides to cash in on the action. He cleverly hires himself out to each gang while remaining loyal to no one but himself. A soldier-of-fortune with his own agenda, he betrays both sides to the other in a bold attempt to destroy the bootleggers and rescue what remains of Jericho's shell-shocked residents. But a traitor can not live among mercenaries without being exposed and killed.

With a screenplay inspired by Akira Kurosawa's classic 1961 samurai epic, Yojimbo, Hill changed the story's setting from 1860s Japan to the fictional Texas border town of Jericho at the height of America's turbulent prohibition era.