The Last Shot, directed and written by Jeff Nathanson, is very loosely based on a true story--an FBI sting operation of the Cosa Nostra. When the film begins, December 1985, kingpins of the Castellano family are gunned down at night on a street in New York. In Houston, three months later, ambitious FBI agent Joe Devine (played by Alec Baldwin) is willing to lose a finger so that he can catch members of the local mafia. When transferred to Providence, Rhode Island, he aims his sights at bringing down Tommy Sanz (played by Tony Shalhoub), the local mafia head. Realizing that the mafia controls the local Teamsters Union, which supplies trucks to the film industry, Devine decides to bribe Sanz on the pretext that he is a Hollywood film producer. To carry out the ruse, he flies to Hollywood, learns what a film producer does, and hires Steven Schats (played by Matthew Broderick) as the director of his pseudofilm. Schats, hitherto an usher at Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, is to direct his own screenplay, "Arizona," a story based on the death of his sister to breast cancer. However, Devine insists that the filming is to be in Rhode Island, not Arizona, so script changes are made, all to Schats's chagrin. Only the opening scene of "Arizona" is filmed, as that is enough to bring about Sanz's arrest. Although the plot may seem straightforward, The Last Shot excels in clever subplots and should be appreciated primarily as a comedy, in which a high point is reached when Devine shops for screenplays on the streets of Hollywood. MH
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