Directed by Richard Linklater
Starring Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, Steve Carell
Rated R
Playing at Landmark Sunshine Cinema, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas
“Last Flag Flying,” a sequel of sorts to the 1973 classic “The Last Detail,” has the makings of a movie of consequence and import but it never gets to the point where the potential is realized.
Richard Linklater adapts Darryl Ponicsan’s 2005 novel along with the author; the starring trio of Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne and Steve Carell has charisma and intelligence to spare. The story of the Vietnam veterans reuniting three decades after the fact to bury Carell’s son, a casualty of the Iraq War, carries emotional and topical weight in the ways it evokes the enormous hardships faced by Gold Star families.
But the picture plays as a pedestrian travelogue, filled with soft comic bits and hollow sermonizing, while the actors are stuck with thinly drawn characters that often default to singular traits. Cranston’s Sal Nealon is a rapscallion blue-collar type; Fishburne’s Richard Mueller a stern and serious reverend; Carell so underplays “Doc” Shepard that he’s barely there.
Their conversations as they reconnect over the course of this journey spell out the movie’s jumble of ideas about the nature of military sacrifice without adhering into a cohesive whole.
The haphazard nature of the production undercuts any major dramatic thrust to the point where it muddles whatever it is Linklater’s trying to achieve. There are moments of consequence and meaning along the course of this journey that are ground into irrelevance by the fact that the filmmaker is so committed to a sort of easy naturalism.
