In his feature directorial debut, Francis Galluppi crafts a pulpy, low-budget, limited-setting crime thriller that is tense, fast-paced, and guaranteed to satisfy genre fans.
The film begins with an unnamed salesman (played by Jim Cummings) stopping at a fuel station in rural Arizona to refuel his car before heading to Calabasas, California, to celebrate his daughter’s birthday. The gas station owner, Vernon (Faizon Love), informs him that the pumps are out of gas and he has to wait for the fuel truck to arrive. Initially, he remains in his car and, while tinkering with the radio, learns that two criminals robbed a bank and fled with $700,000 earlier that morning. Exhausted, he drags himself to the diner next to the gas station, owned and operated by a woman named Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue). The two of them bond and start talking, but their chat is cut short by the arrival of Travis (Nicholas Logan) and Beau (Richard Brake), the same crooks mentioned on the radio. They also need gas and are forced to wait in the diner. However, when the robbers realize Charlotte and the knife salesman have identified them, they threaten and coerce the two into remaining silent until they find a way to get fuel and escape. Soon after, additional customers (all desperate for gas) also arrive at the diner. Among them are an elderly married couple—played by Gene Jones and Robin Bartlett—as well as two petty thieves, Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick), who fancy themselves as the next Kit and Holly from Terrance Malick’s Badlands (1973). It is not long before Travis and Beau start causing trouble again, which is bound to have catastrophic results.
The Last Stop in Yuma County follows the conventional three-act structure, with the first act establishing the characters and presenting a situation they find themselves in, the second act detailing the events leading up to the main conflict, and the third act dealing with the fallout from the second act’s conclusion. The makers effectively sustain the tense nature of the situation throughout the film, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats the entire time.
The film makes good use of limited settings (a small diner in rural Arizona in the middle of nowhere), drawing parallels to Quentin Tarantino’s films Reservoir Dogs (1992) and The Hateful Eight (2016), notably in terms of the isolation of the characters. They do this by setting the film in the 1970s (as evidenced by the cars, rotary phones, etc.), thereby erasing the use of cell phones and other modern technology and making communication difficult for the characters. Then, they make it hard for the characters to move around by setting the film against a barren desert landscape (which brings to mind neo-noir films from the ’90s, such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992) and Dennis Hopper’s The Hot Spot (1990), both of which depict a similar cynical world inhabited by shady people and situated in a scorching wasteland), where getting fuel is a hassle because of the dry pumps at the station, and the nearest one is 100 miles away, thus forcing them to wait for the fuel truck to arrive. Even the diner’s air conditioning is out of commission, trapping the characters inside the hot eatery and heightening the film’s claustrophobic mood.
The film’s third act works quite well, as the plot progression feels natural and does not deviate from the path, which is a relief given the number of ways it could have gone wrong. This is mainly because the audience follows a specific character throughout the last act, and that person’s actions are justified by adequate character development and superb acting. The character also serves as a conduit for the film’s exploration of themes like greed, demonstrating how even an innocent, law-abiding individual can succumb to it and do things he never imagined he would.
The Last Stop in Yuma County movie links: IMDB, Letterboxd
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