Review: Last Flag Flying

Image courtesy of Amazon Studios.

Considering that his films frequently feature young men behind the wheels of cars, it is surprising that Richard Linklater has never made a road trip movie. His latest - "Last Flag Flying," a sequel of sorts to Darryl Ponicsan's novel and Hal Ashby's classic 1973 film "The Last Detail" - is a movie about three men on the road that is occasionally funny and often melancholy and boasts three excellent performances from its leads.

In the film, Bryan Cranston plays Sal Nealon, who is seemingly the Jack Nicholson character from "The Last Detail," although his name in that film was Buddusky. Laurence Fishburne fills in for Otis Young as Rev. Richard Mueller and Steve Carell takes over Randy Quaid's Larry "Doc" Shepherd. While Ashby's original film was a dark comedy, this sequel - while often funny - is a more sombre affair.

As the film opens, Doc wanders into a bar owned by Sal in Virginia. The year is 2003 and the two men haven't seen each other for years. Although Sal owns a business, he is by no means tied down by anything and it doesn't take much arm twisting for Doc to convince him to take a short road trip. They end up in a church where Mueller, once a hard partying ladies man, is now a reverend and are invited to dinner at his house, where they meet his pious wife.

But the happy reunion is interrupted after Doc confesses that his beloved wife had died earlier that year from cancer and, most recently, his son - a marine - was killed while deployed in Iraq. Doc has sought out his two former buddies - with whom he served in the Vietnam War - to accompany him to pick up his son's body and ride along while it is transported to Arlington National Cemetery for burial.

Similar to Linklater's other films, "Last Flag Flying" focuses on people and the way they gab with one another. The director is a great writer and each character - including Cicely Tyson as an elderly mother of a soldier whom the three men knew in Vietnam and J. Quinton Johnson as a soldier pal of Doc's son who travels along with the trio on their journey - gets at least a few scenes of great dialogue. Each of the performances is strong - Fishburne lends a certain gravitas, while Cranston gets to let loose as the incorrigible Sal. But it's Carell who nearly steals the show in a soulful performance as Doc, whose life has, in some ways, been the rockiest of the three characters.

The film is not perfect. There are a few scenes played for laughs that don't quite work - for example, a discussion of Eminem's music by Mueller and Sal, a sequence during which the three leads are mistaken for terrorists and an ongoing joke regarding Sal's newfound obsession with cell phones. But otherwise, "Last Flag Flying" is a film through which - similar to Linklater's other films - the characters come alive through conversation. There's a particularly funny scene during which the three men - and Johnson's character - laugh about the older men's exploits during Vietnam and a quietly moving scene later on a train when they realize that soldiers' experiences in wartime don't vary much from generation to generation.

Linklater has, for a while, been on a roll with his "Before" films, the remarkable "Boyhood" and excellent "Everybody Wants Some." His latest isn't quite on par with the aforementioned, but it's still very good and it ends on a profound one-two punch when the men visit the mother of a fallen comrade and then Sal and Mueller attempt to be there for Doc after receiving a letter written by his son prior to his death. This is a powerful, beautifully acted movie that does justice to its source material and the classic movie that preceded it.