Friday night's a great night for football
You can feel it in the air like lightning on the edge of the night
You can feel it everywhere, but it's party time in Cleveland tonight
Friday night's a great night for football
Catching as tight ends, ready to do it
—THE LAST BOY SCOUT
The Last Boy Scout opens with Billy Blanks—yes, the Tae Bo guy—playing an NFL running back who's about to have the worst game of his life. He's Billy Cole, strung out on pills and pressure. Blackmailed mid-game, he's told to rush for 150 yards or lose everything—his spot, his fix, his life. He pops a handful, eyes go blank in the locker room, then hits the rainy field running on pure instinct.
Ball's snapped. Pitch-out. He tucks and runs. Defensive back barrels in—Cole pulls a gun from under his jersey, pumps three shots through the guy's helmet. Blood and fiberglass everywhere. Keeps going. Another DB dives—Cole blows out his knee. Pandemonium. Players running, cops sprinting, the goalpost collapsing. Cole crosses the line, drops the ball, turns, smiles, and says, "I'm going to Disneyland..." Puts the gun to his helmet. Bang.
It's brutal and absurd—and we're barely past the kickoff. Football's just another racket—players get chewed up, the dream dies on camera, and nobody stops the broadcast. The NFL wanted nothing to do with this movie, so the teams are the Stallions and the Cats instead of actual franchises. The only time you should see the word "stallion" is on the back of a license plate frame about Italians.
Cut to Joe Hallenbeck, the last boy scout—disgraced ex-Secret Service turned PI, sleeping off a bender in his car under the freeway. Dead squirrel lands on his chest courtesy of neighborhood kids. He wakes, stuffs a .38 in a kid's face ("Hey, motherfucker"), then realizes and lets go. Vomit on the lawn, Camel lit, Seagram's in hand. Jimmy Dix gets his own version: ex-QB, coke spoon in the mirror, flashing back to glory days on the field—seventy thousand screaming, perfect spiral, feeling alive—now this.
From there, it's the same pattern: rigged games, senators taking bribes, painkillers handed out like Tic Tacs so players can grind through the damage. Villains like Milo exude slick, dramatic, prissy menace. The bad guys monologue with campy flair while the heroes trade insults through gunfire. It gets so excessive, the darkness starts feeling ridiculous instead of scary.
Hallenbeck's a mess—marriage wrecked, daughter hates him—but he still operates by some code: protect family, team up with Dix (even if they just insult each other). Dix talks about his wife getting killed during his best game, their kid lived 17 minutes. That lands harder than Dix getting thrown from an overpass. The banter's sharp ("Smile, you fuck"—Hallenbeck to his own reflection). But the two of them keep showing up anyway—protecting family, refusing to quit. In a world this rotten, being the last boy scout isn't naive—it's just what's left.
The Last Boy Scout works. It's unapologetically '90s, made for people who want their action movies bitter and loud. The original script had Joe donate the money to charity—they kept it. That's the whole movie: when everything's broken, the only honest move is to stop pretending otherwise.
Final Verdict: 85 out of 100