The Last Match (1990)

Best movie of this year hands down!

So much average

How sad is this?

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Cliff Gaylor (Tobias) is a football player with an attitude. When his daughter Susan (Melissa Palmisano in her only screen credit) gets framed for having illegal drugs while on vacation in either a Caribbean or South American country (not really sure), and is imprisoned, Gaylor at first tries all the traditional channels to free her. He first goes to see his American Consul (Napier, here credited as "American Consul") but he's useless. He then goes to see a local lawyer (Balsam, credited as "Lawyer"), who also is incapable of helping him. So Gaylor then does the next natural thing: he calls his football coach (Borgnine, here credited as "Coach". Sensing a pattern here?) - and gets his entire football team to stage a commando raid on the prison, but not before arming and training them in the usage of machine guns. Of course, the whole team agrees and Coach "coaches" the mission. But they're going to have to get past sadistic prison warden Yashin (Silva) and his underling Prison Guard (Moldovan). Will the team be able to punt, spike, blitz, sack, snap, and tackle their way towards reaching their (field) goal? Find out today! The Last Match had a lot going for it: a strong cast, an amazing concept, and the football players in full regalia brandishing machine guns and grenade launchers visually just looks awesome. Unfortunately, the movie only really kicks into high gear in the final third. Most of the movie is a staid and bland "My Daughter's In Prison" drama with echoes of Midnight Express (1978). One thing Midnight Express did not have is a bunch of crazed footballers on the rampage shooting machine guns at Henry Silva while Ernest Borgnine happily gives instructions through a headset as to what to do next. Unless we blinked and missed that part. But because of the rarity of this movie, most people haven't gotten to see the cast of Borgnine, Balsam, Silva, Napier, Moldovan, and the footballers do their thing so audiences can decide for themselves. Had this been released on VHS in America during the golden age of video stores, it might have had a shot at being a well-known cult movie. Now it's just a not-so-well-known cult movie, which is only really justified by the last third.Also of note are the "whosh-whosh" sounds on the soundtrack that sound like someone is waving a piece of cardboard in the air, Borgnine being especially jovial about his wartime experiences, the evil drug dealer who has a shirt that says "NEWS", and the subplot about saving an Elian-like kid from the third-world hellhole that is the unnamed country they're trying to escape from. Also there's a guy in the cast named Jim Kelly who's a White guy and not the Jim Kelly we all know and love. So to recap, the country is unidentified, half the characters don't have proper names, and the football team also has no name. We realize they didn't have the budget to use an NFL team name, but it would have been funny if they had come up with an attempt, like the "New York Sharks" or something to that effect. But then again, the way it is is pretty funny.Another good thing about the movie is that the whole "Football Commandos" idea is played completely straight. It doesn't appear that the filmmakers thought this was a wacky or ironic idea - they seemingly thought it was a perfectly sane concept for an action movie. And thank goodness for that. We get more than enough irony these days as it is. Just look at the training sequence where fully suited up football players shoot machine guns at targets. That's why we keep going back to these Italian productions. They always seem to deliver in some way, shape or form. But the fact that a quality idea like this didn't really take off to its full potential shows that by 1991 things were starting to run out of gas. Much like Martin Balsam, who gives a bizarre, stuttering performance in a complete sit-down role. He seems really confused as he reads his lines off a piece of paper. Compare that to Borgnine, who injects the movie with some much-needed energy during the interminable first and second portions.In the end, The Last Match has a killer concept, but ultimately doesn't hit the mark. Or score a touchdown, if you will.

this is an excellent movie from oliver Tobias! he is not a very good actor, but he still perform well here...this movie is about a match... a rugby team...they turn to be a super hero@super team to fight the villains...they know how to handle weapons!!! they went out to fight wearing their sport clothes!!! this is great!! a great sport action movie!! there are plenty of great cast in this movie, and the acting are excellent!! give this movie a chance..because it deserves it!! there are only 20 people voting for this movie..and i'm voting this movie for 10 out of 10 stars !!! come on guys!! give this movie a chance !!! 10/10********* (very good!)

Well, let's be brutally honest here; It has to be said that Fabrizio De Angelis's The Last Match proves overall to be a very, very underwhelming affair but one that unfortunately typifies the overall failing fortunes and diminishing quality of output from the Italian movie industry at the time of it's making.It's a decidedly lazily constructed effort suffering uninspired direction, some poor editing, a bad script and even a particularly dreadful musical score to further sink proceedings.Having said the above, the film does on the other hand boast a few points in it's favour, most notably the great assemble cast of B-movie stars including Oliver Tobias, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Napier, Martin Balsam and Henry Silva amongst others. It seems that a number of these big names knew full well that they were saddled with a stinker however and gave somewhat lacklustre performances in response. Just take a look at the usually excellent Martin Balsam for instance, who appears in this film to be squinting to read his lines from a cue card(!) so much so in fact that I at first thought his character was supposed to be blind or something!!!OK so there is the admitted novelty of an entire American football team launching an all out assault on a jail (decked out in full game gear no less!) but even these sequences which should have been the stuff of trash movie heaven are handled so ineptly that one hardly cares, much less laughs. To be fair there is at least one cool scene towards the end whereby one enterprising player puts a grenade into a football before drop kicking it at an airborne helicopter and blowing it out of the sky(!!!) but in all honesty, such a classic crappy scene comes just too little too late to lift this snooze fest.OK so that's the review; To summarise, despite the films admittedly ridiculous sounding plot (a trash classic plot in fact) the film never even nearly lives up to its potential and furthermore ostensibly and unforgivably takes itself utterly seriously(!!!!!) Why am I still rambling on then you might well ask? Well I've just got to say this; There is a character in this film that induced in me a bizarre and uncontrollable urge to kill him in the most violent manner possible!!! Who was this person? His name was George, the boyfriend of the hero's daughter. Words simply cannot describe what a geeky, floppy haired, creepy son of a bitch this character was! Damn, it's making me mad just thinking about his scenes now!!! The guy had the most annoying nature about him I think I have ever witnessed in any film. Am I making any sense here? Do you think me insane perhaps? OK, well if you want an example of why I hated this cretin so much, just check out the scene near the start where he is sitting in the back of a taxi with his girlfriend. He is staring at her point blank range in the most disgustingly, sickening and downright cringe inducing manner imaginable! Not only that but he does it for the whole damn journey! Literally he doesn't move his bloody head - he just stares right at her in this horrible, bloody irritating manner the whole time!!!! OK, OK......I'll go and lay down now but just check out this guy for yourselves......I promise you'll desire to bring about his abrupt dissolution after viewing him to!

I kept having the feeling watching this movie that they really didn't have any money for any of the post-production work. Obviously they intended to redub the audio to give the actors better voices but they never did. Oliver Tobias is supposed to be a famous American football player, but occasionally his British accent slips out! Even more funny is Jeff Moldovan as the "Dominican" guard who speaks out against Americans but obviously has no sort of accent or anything (he's just an American made up to look Latino).As for the other aspects of the film, it's a pretty wild and spectacular disaster when it finally decides to get going. The first half is rather dull with Tobias searching for his daughter and finding her in an awful Dominican jail. The second half involving the football team raiding the prison while wearing their uniforms must be seen to be believed. Particularly hilarious is the scene later on where the football team wipes out the entire Dominican army at an airport and don't even lose a single guy (even though they are wearing cumbersome bright yellow uniforms). Then a guy sticks a grenade inside a football and drop-kicks it into an enemy helicopter, blowing it out of the sky! I honestly could never have dreamt up something any more ludicrous, and this movie is worth the watch for that alone.Be warned though, despite the presence of a whole host of cool actors and the fact that it was made by the legendary producer Fabrizio De Angelis under a fake name, this film is absolutely abysmal and was never released in the U.S. for a reason. Shamelessly bad photography, moronic music, and extraordinarily bad acting run amuck here and more of the actors seem bored out of their minds besides Borgnine who seems to have some fun even though I'm sure even he was aware the film would be terrible. As a side note, I noticed that a curiously high amount of people in the cast were named "Jim".