EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing gives me greater joy than when our site gets mentioned on my favorite podcast, The Cannon Canon. There are a few movies they’ve covered that I haven’t, so it’s time to fix that.

I had a friend that I used to go to a movie with every weekend. It didn’t matter sometimes if we even wanted to see a movie. The Last Boy Scout was one of those movies and you know, it was different from the moment it started, when an L.A. Stallions running back (Billy Blanks!) pulls out a gun in the middle of a game. But that just seems like background noise as Joe Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis), once a national hero for taking a bullet for the President of the United States, now learns that his wife Sarah (Chelsea Field) is sleeping with his business partner (Bruce McGill). And now he has another boring job, guarding an exotic dancer named Cory (Halle Berry).

But then a car bomb kills Mike. And things aren’t so boring.

Soon after, Joe is approached by Cory’s boyfriend, one-time Stallions quarterback Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans). He wants his woman off the stage and seems every bit of the errratic man who was banned for gambling and drugs. Joe is beat up by some hitmen who kill Cory and nearly do the same to Jimmy before he saves his life.

This is all because she had a tape of Senator Calvin Baynard (Chelcie Ross) and Stallions owner Sheldon Marcone (Noble Willingham) that neither man wants the public to ever hear. She was using it to get Jimmy back on the team but they sent the killers instead. But their evidence gets blown up in another car bomb. That said, Joe is now on Jimmy’s side, because the reason he was removed from the Secret Service was because he once stopped Baynard from abusing a woman. Well, maybe they aren’t that close, because he throws Jimmy out when he catches him doing drugs. As he walks out, he signs his rookie card for Joe’s daughter Darian (Danielle Harris), “To the daughter of the last boy scout.”

This is where we enter the dark world of a Shane Black movie, much less one directed by Tony Scott. The police figure Joe killed Mike, so they come to arrest him. Milo (Taylor Negron, so missed and beyond beloved) kills the cops and Marcone explains what Joe has stepped into. The team owner has been buying Senate votes to legalize sports gambling until Baynard tried to blackmail him for $6 million. Knowing Joe’s history with Baynard, Marcone says that it’s cheaper to kill the senator with a bomb in a suitcase and frame Joe for the murder. He’s saved by Jimmy and Darian, but Milo is the only of Marcone’s men to survive. He recovers and takes her.

So yes, of course this ends with Taylor Negron getting shredded by a helicopter, the rich guy blown up and Willis and Wayans as friends. Joe even gets his wife back. But who cares if it’s predicatable? Nothing else has been in this movie.

Black wrote this while getting over a failed romance. He sold it for $1.75 million and Joel Silver agreed to produce it. He also wanted its original title for another movie he was making, Nothing Lasts Forever. Yes, before it was changed to The Last Boy Scout, this movie had the title Die Hard.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of The Last Boy Scout here.