Maybe somebody with a longer attention span than I have will check in on this one later with more intelligent comments than I can make. I have a low tolerance for this type of movie, especially one that's made the way this one was; I can't help but compare it, mostly unfavorably, with THE FALL. Both are set in Eastern Europe so the backdrop is very similar, but unlike THE FALL, LAST RUN is a political story. And the politics are much outdated, despite the fact that the movie was only made three years ago. Apparently the script was sitting around for a long time before somebody decided to do something with it.
I only have a vague idea of how the story actually went because I couldn't follow the dialog during the first part of the movie. I remember complaining about the cast of mumblers in THE FALL (boot captains excepted), and this was almost as bad. Every actor in LAST RUN had a different accent, and most of them muttered their lines unintelligibly, so it's like:
[Hungarian accent] I want you to mumble mumble mumble.
[French accent] What makes you think mumble mumble mumble?
After finding out that raising the volume (and raising it, and raising it) wasn't going to help, I tried replaying bits. That didn't help much either, because I mostly couldn't catch it the second time either, and when I did, whatever they were saying turned out not to be that interesting. Eventually I became attuned to the speech and was able to follow it, but by then I'd already missed out on key elements of the plot and wasn't even sure who the good guys & bad guys were, because there were a lot of characters. Also one woman I COULD understand distracted me mightily in the first few minutes by telling Armand where his enemies were, and adding, "But I'm not sure. I don't trust my judgment. I'm pregnant, you know."
So I spent the next 10 minutes wondering... what? Is her vision blurry? Is she hormonally crazed? Does she hallucinate and think everybody she sees is a giant pickle? What? WHAT?
We'll never know, because she got shot up shortly after that. So apparently her judgment was, in fact, impaired. I'm just not sure what the mechanics were.
So some people are trying to kill Jürgen to get this key from him. It has something to do with somebody who's running for president of Russia. You find out what that's about at the end, and I see no reason to spoil it here.
Armand is trying to meet up with Jürgen to save his life from the assassins who are following Armand around hoping he'll lead them to Jürgen. One thing I did like about this movie was the ole switcheroo, because it was fun. Armand & co. want to smuggle Jürgen out of the country he's in. They do it by working out a mutual disguise. One guy has his face made up with heavy prosthetics and leaves the country on a fake passport. Jürgen then returns on the same passport, made up with the same prosthetics. A clever device, and well done.
What I didn't like about the movie was just about everything else, except for Jürgen petting the fluffy cat. (Actually, the cast was very good except for one guy who got on my nerves; they just couldn't talk, is all.) The screenwriter seemed to be hellbent on having a lot of women get killed in this story. A lot of men got killed too, but the femme fatality rate was approximately 100%... and the main one who didn't get killed got shot up. About the time you figure out that's how the whole movie's going to be, you start getting the creeps over it, particularly since in every case it was a woman who had some kind of relationship going with one of the men. Whoever wrote this needs help.
My main gripe is the direction. Hickox does well in terms of performance and action, but has no eye for anything. The story is set in Austria, and Hungary, and Germany, and Romania, and who knows where else. There's some gorgeous scenery in evidence, but you get the impression nobody working on the film noticed that. When it has any effect at all, it's by sheer accident. They also didn't have the slightest idea how to take advantage of the beautiful old-world interior settings. In THE FALL, every frame is a work of art. In LAST RUN, the background - whatever that may be - is just stuff. I would also swear that they didn't even have anybody in charge of lighting, indoors or out. If they did, they need to get their money back.
Since my standards are infamously low I won't say LAST RUN is offensively bad, but it's definitely a non-starter. The Russian politics plot (we must clean up the corruption) just isn't much of a hook these days. You can sort of care what happens to Armand and Jürgen, but only if you like them a lot as actors. As many characters as were running around, you should be able to do more than sort-of care about only two of them.
Once I found out what that key led to, I thought all those dead people were saps to get killed over it.