Last Rampage (2017)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Admirable film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

It is frightening that there are cold blooded heartless killers and ignorant insecure people that follow them. It was gut wrenching watching a young family with their baby and a newlywed couple executed in cold blood by cowards. Used to Hollywood movie scripts, you can't help but anticipating the innocent people somehow escape and overcome their captors. Having lived in the Mohave desert, the screen can not come close to capturing the constant oppressive heat that can kill a person without water in hours as well as invoking heat stroke along with confused thinking. If Tison was in anything like Sheriff Joe's outdoor prison, I'd do anything to escape that hell hole.

This movie keeps you tensed since it's beginning. The fact that this story happened in real world some forty years ago makes you feel chill throughout especially during those murder scenes. Good acting by everyone. I was taken aback by surprise when I saw Heather Graham playing a role of an old woman. She acted really well.

Way too many Joshua Trees for the actual territory this crime spree covered. The Tisons meandered through Arizona towards Yuma, then up to Flagstaff, briefly into eastern NM, southwestern CO and back into AZ towards Casa Grande. They were ultimately stopped near AZ City. Someone noted in the "Errors" section that saguaros only grow in southern AZ. While most saguaros grow down Tucson way, you will find them naturally from Phoenix south and out along I-8 to Yuma. There are a lot growing in areas near Casa Grande so that part is accurate. Joshua Trees grow primarily in CA so there would have been few to none in the areas covered by Tison gang. This was probably filmed in Mojave.

This true crime drama about the 1978 prison break of murderer Gary Tison plays like a standard made-for-television drama.At the start of the film, the character of Tison comes across as a wise guy spouting off one-liners like "B. F. Goodrich is a good tire," just as the tire is about to go flat on the getaway car. Tison's escape from the Arizona prison was not due so much to his planning or the assistance he received from his fawning sons. Rather, the prison conditions were lax and the officials in charge were incompetent. After Tison and another inmate, Randy Greenawalt, escape, Tison demands complete loyalty from his sons, who become accessories to murder after Tison and Greenawalt kill six innocent people in cold blood.The filmmakers tried unsuccessfully to raise this tawdry crime drama to a biblical level. The film opens with a quote from Exodus about wrath of the God of the Old Testament: "I, the Lord Thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me."Unfortunately, the scope of the film was not biblical, but filled only with pathos coming from a dysfunctional family. Tison was undone when he disrupted his escape plans to search for his brother whom he wanted to kill. The filmmakers probably want this to appear like the story of Cain and Abel, when Tison asserts that "Blood calls to blood, and blood answers back." But the final result was no more than the saga of a demented loser, willing to sacrifice the lives of his sons to save his own hide.It was the brother's tip about the Econoline truck driven by Tison and his boys that sealed his doom. The true motto of the sleazy Tison was not about "blood," but about cowardice, when, in dire straits, he yells, "Every man for himself!" So much for blood, family values, and paternal concern for his sons!