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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Leslie Felperin

The Last Son review – outlaw has to kill or be killed by his own kids in gothic western

Sam Worthington in The Last Son.
Problem children … Sam Worthington in The Last Son. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

Somewhere in the wild west, sometime after the civil war, legendary outlaw Isaac LeMay (Sam Worthington) decides to take his fate into his own hands and circumvent a prophecy that he can only be killed by one of his own children. That means tracking down his many offspring and slaying them first, one by one. A man of very few words but blessed with an inordinate abundance of hair and uncanny luck when it comes to avoiding bullets, LeMay has a few talents, but not a lot of charm. Also, he’s clearly never read any fairy tales of Greek tragedies otherwise he’d know that an ironic twist lies directly in his path in the last act, one that most viewers will see coming from miles across the prairies and hilly terrain.

Meanwhile, LeMay is himself being tracked by various unaligned bounty hunters and folks with a grudge or cause, such as gun-and-tracker-for-hire Solomon (Thomas Jane), a former Union soldier who was raised by Native Americans, Cal (Colson Baker, AKA rapper Machine Gun Kelly) a son of LeMay who’s taken up the family trade of outlawing even though he never met his Pa. (In a couple of on-the-nose scenes the latter gets to operate an actual machine gun.) There’s also a daughter, Megan (Emily Marie Palmer), who seemingly felt slighted when LeMay declined to kill her, thinking she was too meek to pose a threat.

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