The premise of "Catch the Bullet" director Michael Feifer's fourth western "Last Shoot Out" is simple and straightforward. A young, dewy-eyed, blond, newlywed, Jocelyn Callahan (Skylar Witte of "Top Gun: Maverick") eavesdrops accidentally on a conversation between her father-in-law, Blair Callahan (Bruce Dern) and his oldest son Sid (Cam Gigandet of "Never Back Down"), about how Sid shot her father in the back. Jocelyn's dad was a lawman who was trying to arrest Sid's younger brother, Jody (Michael Welch of "Twilight"), i.e., Jocelyn's future husband, for murdering a prostitute. Without a second thought, our heroine steals a horse and hightails it without informing anybody at her noisy wedding reception about her departure. Later, the unruly horse she was riding threw her, and she wound up wandering for days on foot without food and water. Naturally, her fuming husband Jody intends to retrieve his wife no matter what the cost. Meantime, Jocelyn encounters an elderly, avuncular freighter, Red Linstrom (Peter Sherayko of "Bone Tomahawk") and a footloose gunslinger, Billy Tyson (Brock Harris of "Wild Game"), and they usher her to a remote stagecoach relay station at Wild Horse Flats. Although Jocelyn and Jody have exchanged wedding vows, they haven't consummated their marriage. A seasoned cast and solid production values are the chief assets of this plausible, but predictable sagebrusher. Veteran bad guy actor Bruce Dern chews the scenery as the sadistic Callahan patriarch. Clocking in with less than fifteen minutes of screen time, Dern capitalizes on his few moments in "Last Shoot Out" with a performance reminiscent of Walter Brennan's despicable father figure in the vintage John Ford horse opera "My Darling Clementine" (1946). Mind you, Dern would achieve notoriety himself as one of Hollywood's most memorable villains whose bullets blasted holes in the back of John Wayne's cattle-driving boss in "The Cowboys" (1972), and Dern remains just as cantankerous as ever.
Eventually, the bewildered Jocelyn staggers to a halt at a crossroads. She finds herself standing in front of Red's freight wagon with Billy seated alongside him, while Sid and his hired gun, Twigs (Jay Pickett of "Catch the Bullet"), lurk behind her. Director Michael Feifer and "Shadow of the Mesa" writer Lee Martin foreshadow the inevitable "Last Shoot Out" conflict with this preliminary showdown. Sid grabs Jocelyn so he can take her back to his kid brother, but she bites his hand. Sid lashes out at her, and the impact of his blow spins Jocelyn around, and she crumples to her knees in the dust. Dramatically, Billy trudges up to Sid and advises him to leave Jocelyn alone. Twigs warns Sid that Billy Tyson might be faster on the draw. Nevertheless, supreme egotist that he is, Sid slaps leather with Billy. Whipping out his revolver with blinding speed, Billy blows Sid's six-gun out of his hand. Sid retreats and rides off shamed for the first time. Later, Red rustles up some clean clothes for Jocelyn from his freight wagon. They escort her to Rhyker's stagecoach station, where the company man, Joe (David DeLuise of "American Decaf"), welcomes them. One of Blair's gun hands, Hardy (Ardeshir Radpour of "Bone Tomahawk"), gallops back to the Callahans to report the arrival of Jocelyn with Red and Billy.
After the regularly scheduled stage pulls out of the station, Blair's gunmen halt it on the trail and kill the shotgun messenger. They order the driver at gunpoint to return to the station. Later, Jody rides up to the station and pleads for Jocelyn to let bygones be bygones. She refuses to accommodate Jody since she knows the truth about her father's demise as well as Jody, a ruffian her father sought to arrest for beating a saloon girl to death with his bare hands. Not surprisingly, Jocelyn wants nothing to do with the Callahans. Although the Callahans and their army of trigger-happy gunslingers outnumber our heroes, Joe and Billy dig up some nitroglycerin to even the odds. Meanwhile, Blair and company lay siege to our heroes in the stagecoach station. They give them one last chance to send Jocelyn back to them with Twig who has been sent to collect her. Instead, Billy and Red disarm Twigs and take him hostage. By this time, despite Jody's demands that no harm come to his wife, Blair decides everybody, including the innocent stagecoach passengers, must die. A full-scale battle erupts with gunfire and explosions galore.
Along the way, Feifer and Martin provide some surprises so our outnumbered heroes have a better chance of survival despite the Callahan's numerical superiority. Mind you, nobody will garner any Oscars, but the cast delivers sturdy performances, with Dern, Gigandet, and Pickett standing out. Feifer and Martin have pared down the gunplay to its bare essentials. During the first quarter hour, they not only establish the life and death stakes at hand but also acquaint audiences with the motives of both the heroes and the villains. Skillfully, the filmmakers foreshadow the inevitable events of "Last Shoot Out" and efficiently tie up all the loose threads by fadeout. Anybody familiar with classic western movies will spot some homages that Feifer and Martin have made. For example, Jody says he killed the prostitute because she laughed at him. Remember, all the violence in the Oscar-winning Clint Eastwood western "Unforgiven" (1992) transpired because a sardonic prostitute ridiculed the size of a cowboy's virility. The expository dialogue description of the nitroglycerin is straight out of the sensational Lee Marvin & Burt Lancaster western "The Professionals" (1966), a leathery tough tale about soldiers of fortune in Mexico. An amusing romantic ending concludes this frontier fracas with our hero dreading the prospect of matrimony himself more than all the lead that riddled the stagecoach station. This entertaining, low-budget, PG-13 rated oater doesn't reinvent the western, but then it never wears out its welcome thanks to its bracing, 85-minute runtime.
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