The Last Sentinel
Originally Reviewed 14th July 2016
–+-+– The Last Sentinel –+-+– By Kevin Maude
“They were the perfect soldiers to protect civilization-until the drone police became the perfect enemy. With little hope left for mankind, Tallis, an electronically enhanced soldier, rescues a rebel beauty from a failed resistance mission. A force to be reckoned with, she will learn to fight and think like a machine for the final battle to save the human race.”
Welcome to world of The Last Sentinel. We had high hopes for this, the Movie guide had given it 3 out of 4 stars and the cast had some people we had heard of, mainly Katie SuckOff of BSG fame (a woman who I fear looks like she would always have the faint aroma of spunk about her).
This film is such a mess we’re going to take you through the plot so there will be a few spoilers.
Starting in an old oil refinery the film firmly establishes that Tallis is the last survivor of a team of elite, electronically enhanced soldiers, hunting for what little food there is and all alone in the world where the humans have been slaughtered by the Drones. All alone apart from his computer enhanced gun, which gives him advice, constantly. We speculated it would likely be helping him while he dropped a deuce for example, “look out Tallis, your running low on TP, you better double up”. Despite Tallis being all alone he does eventually a girl, who I don’t recall ever having a name, and they decide to take on the Drones and save mankind.
Their first attempt does not go fully to plan, the do manage to infiltrate the oil refinery that is being used as the base for the Drones and get to the computer room. Once there they steal the data disk but have to fight their way out in what can only be described as the most stupid escape ever, ladies and gentlemen I give you “shooting the ground at your feet with a grenade and falling through the ensuing hole, twice”.
Once back at Tallis’ hideout Tallis is injured and girl has to take care of him. While he sleeps she knocks up a nice stew and has a giant bottle of Vitamin Water, in what is one of the most blatant product placement scenes I have ever witnessed. Once recovered Tallis takes the girl under his tutelage, showing her how to shoot, wield a knife and anything else that looks good in a short montage. He also teaches her such tactics as “We’ll convince them it’s a frontal assault and then sneak in”… hold on there a minute Rambo, your tactic for sneaking in, is to first put the whole base on full alert? Finally he shows her how to wear a cloak, not a special cloak that hides your biometric readings or anything, just a cloak in case it gets a bit nippy. At this point I have no idea why they have stolen the disk.
Tallis pops out of the hideout and at this time the Drones break in and capture the girl, but wait, she escapes. However, Tallis thinks she is dead. Tallis now goes back to the old oil refinery, a place at this point I know better than my own house, and takes on the Drones fighting his way back to the computer room (that looks like something from 1990 not 2090 I add). He blows up the computers and this in effect kills the drones. Yes, blowing up the computers in the room they were in last time was all they needed to do, something they could have done on the last visit. I still have no idea what the disk is for.
However, there are now some new new non-computer bound drones that Tallis then fights, he has to cut out his own eye as part of the battle, which sees him in a showdown with the one remaining clone, which he has to fight in hand-to-hand combat. This drone, just by chance you understand, is really big. Anyhow, Tallis kills the drone and then the girl turns up and asks him “what happened to your eye?”, whilst handing him his gun. Begging the question, what the hell was the point of the girl? She basically cooked a stew and tidied up a bit. She was meant to be humanities last hope “she will learn to fight and think like a machine for the final battle to save the human race “; instead she took a break while Tallis here basically did everything by himself. She didn’t even help out when he was fighting mega drone back there. She was effectively a sci-fi housewife.
So what we basically have is a plot that keeps on forgetting what has transpired and just seems to be winging it scene by scene, it’s like about 20 writers took it in turn to write bits of the film. Examples include:
“The Drones are the perfect killing machine, they never miss” – well they do, a lot, even if you run at them with nunchucks
“They have thermal imaging scanners” – but Tallis and Girl are able to hide behind pipes – maybe the cloaks are magic?
“She is mankind’s last hope” – but she does a bunk and turns up only at the end when the hard work has been done
Another problem in a film was we couldn’t really hear the dialogue well and no amount of turning up the volume helped. I’d suggest that the sound engineer and the location manager need lining up in an old oil refinery and shooting. Now, It is plausible that this quirk meant that we took a dimmer view of the film than was deserved. However, we would counter this with this sound issue causing one of the highlights of what was otherwise an irritatingly dull film. When asked if there is somewhere to wash Tallis tells girl “there is some water in a rain tank, it’s Cobra clean”. It took us three listens to work out he actually said were “it’s cold but clean”, which as really disappointing – Cobra Clean should be a thing, please help us make Cobra Clean a thing. The next time someone asks you how clean something is tell them “Cobra Clean”.
In summary this is a really bad film for so many reasons but the main one being it just makes no sense. It may be worth a watch just to see how bad it is, but our view was we just didn’t care in the end, win, lose, die, live, we just wanted it to end.
