The Last Movie Star (2017)

Though their are a few later credit's on his IMDb page The Last Movie Star is in effect Burt Reynolds final movie. It's a farewell, an elegy, a mea culpa for a life where many mistakes were made, but where a great deal of public good will still exists towards a man who really embodied what being a movie star could be in the 1970's and 80's. Burt plays a version of himself, a former movie star named Vic Edwards, and the opening sequence of the film really sets up what your getting. It starts with a slightly altered clip of 'Edwards' on a talk show in the 1970's, he's at his prime, he's seemingly joyous, it then cuts to a present day where Vic is in a waiting room at a vets office holding a cancer stricken beagle who has to have put down. Vic's life is morose, but a friend (Chevy Chase) encourages him to accept an invitation to receive a lifetime achievement award at the International Nashville Film Festival, only they have mistaken this for the Nashville International Film Festival, the International Nashville Film Festival turns out to be little more then a bunch of people watching movies in a bar.

The expected recriminations follow and the first part of the film I didn't particularly like, but it really gets into it's own when Vic decides to use the personal assistant he was promised for the weekend (Aril Winter, trying to be as little like Alex Dunphy as possible) to drive him to his home town of Knoxville and take a trip down memory lane and have some misadventures (the real Reynolds was born in Michigan but grew up in Jupiter, Florida). Through his alter ego Reynolds is able to examine his mixed legacy, take a look at the mistakes he made and remind viewers that in spit of that how much we still like him. One of the conceits of the film are dream sequences where Burt is edited into footage from some of his best known films and has conversations with younger versions of himself, from Smokey and the Bandit, and Deliverance. The film isn't in a hurry, Burt has a nice arc, does some solid acting, and its just an enjoyable reminiscence, ending with a shot of Burt's roughish smile. Not a great movie, but a movie I'm glade exists. ***