The Last Shot

THE LAST SHOT is the laugh-out-loud comedy caper that takes the movie business, the Mob, and the FBI and turns them into some very funny business indeed. Matthew Broderick (THE STEPFORD WIVES) and Academy Award® nominee Alec Baldwin (Best Supporting Actor, THE COOLER, 2003; ALONG CAME POLLY) head a cast of outstanding stars who steal scenes and grab your funny bone every chance they get. After years of being on the A-List of complete failures, Hollywood screenwriter Steven Schats (Broderick) meets Joe Devine (Baldwin), a producer who green-lights his movie and makes him the director. But Devine isn't who he claims to be, not by a long shot. He's really an FBI agent using the movie in a sting to take down the mob. Inspired by the true story of the greatest movie never made, THE LAST SHOT is truly funny.

Taking off from an amazing true story, The Last Shot mines some pleasing inside-Hollywood gags about indie-film production. But this is no ordinary indie: An FBI agent (Alec Baldwin) sets up an elaborate ruse to sting some mobsters in Rhode Island, by picking a screenplay from the slush pile and financing pre-production. The movie will never be made, but the bogus production will lure the mobsters into the trap. The hitch is, the starry-eyed writer-director (Matthew Broderick), cast, and crew have no idea they're part of an undercover operation--the poor saps think their ship has come in and they're actually making a movie. Adding to the joke is that Baldwin finds himself enchanted by the moviemaking world and beginning to care about his unsuspecting stooge (Broderick is at his most engaging). Writer-director Jeff Nathanson (who scripted Catch Me if You Can) doesn't quite trust this funny set-up, sweetening the pot with too sentimental nudges, but the two stars develop a handy odd-couple chemistry. Toni Collette, as a has-been actress, and Joan Cusack, as a sharp-tongued agent, have some riotous moments. --Robert Horton