I had a friend I used to go to the movies with every weekend. Sometimes it didn’t even matter if we 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). 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, Cory’s boyfriend, one-time Stallions quarterback Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans), approaches Joe. He wants his woman off the stage and seems every bit the erratic man who was banned for gambling and drugs. Joe is beaten 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 used 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 that 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. Jimmy and Darian save him, but Milo is the only one 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 predictable? 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 was titled Die Hard.
The Arrow Video 4K UHD and Blu-ray releases of this movie have a brand new 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative by Arrow Films approved by director of photography Ward Russell; new udio commentary by film critics Josh Nelson and Martyn Pedler; interviews with Shane Black and Danielle Harris; “The Art of Tony Scott”, a newly filmed appreciation by film historian Stéphane Moïssakis, editor of Tony Scott: The Style and the Substance; “Shane Black at the American Cinematheque”, an on-stage interview from Beyond Fest 2025 in which the celebrated screenwriter discusses his career with film historian Jim Hemphill; extended and alternate Scenes, a selection of scenes from a pre-release workprint version of the film; trailers; an image gallery; the original screenplay; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sam Hadley and a collectors’ booklet containing new writing on the film by critics Jedidiah Ayres, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Justin LaLiberty, Andrew Male and Priscilla Page. You can get the 4K UHD and Blu-ray from MVD.
