Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticIt takes some nerve casting a scandal-embattled star like Mel Gibson as a colorful TV celebrity suspected of killing his wife.
Those who’ve stood by Gibson despite multiple attempts by the actor to sabotage his own career will likely admire the chutzpah of “Last Looks,” even if his flamboyantly named (and mustachioed) Alastair Pinch — a borderline-blotto, Colonel Sanders-looking Southern judge on a show called “Johnnie’s Bench” — is just a side character (the main suspect) in an overcrowded Hollywood detective story that’s got gimmicks to burn.The ringmaster of this three-ring circus is one Charlie Waldo (Charlie Hunnam, looking like he hasn’t shaved since “Sons of Anarchy”), a disgraced former LAPD golden boy with even wilder facial hair than Pinch.
It’s like a pandemic beard, minus the pandemic. A few years earlier, Waldo went off the grid after realizing he couldn’t undo the wrongful conviction that launched his career.
Where’s Waldo now? Living in self-imposed exile — or “extraction,” per the clunky opening voiceover — in Idyllwild, having reduced all that he owns to just 100 possessions.
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