Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying is about as good a movie can be with the acting talent it has. The film is based on a novel by Darryl Ponicsan (who co-wrote the script with Linklater) which was meant to be a sequel to his novel The Last Detail which was the source for the famous 1973 Jack Nicholson/Hal Ashby film of the name. There’s not very much substance to Last Flag Flying being a sequel to the film The Last Detail except in spirit. Both films had a mistrust held deep inside of them for the government and for authority in general. They see soldiers for what they are: scared kids turned into stone-cold adults too quickly and too often exploited by those who send them out. Both films understand the toll of combat, and how differently those who survive it cope with their remorse. It makes sense that Linklater would make this film. He’s seemed to inherit a good deal from Ashby, from his working class curiosity and his taste for whimsy. Last Flag Flying strikes me as an entirely too serious film, but Linklater and his cast know how to make a solid film.

The film takes place in 2003 and stars the winning trio of Bryan Cranston, Steve Carrell and Laurence Fishburne as three Vietnam veterans who saw some shit both on the ground and between each other. Carrell is Larry ‘Doc’ Shepherd, a mustachioed man with very mild emotions who just learned his son was killed in Baghdad during an ambush on his troop. Using the internet, he finds Sal Nealon (Cranston) running a bar in Virginia, little changed from his rambunctious younger self. They go on to find Richard Mueller (Fishburne), who has now found God and become a pastor, little resembling the troublemaker he used to be the last time the three of them were together, and he was nicknamed “Mueller the mauler”. Doc asks his former friends to accompany him to Arlington where they’re going to bury his son. The men are taken aback, having not seen Doc for decades. Doc’s career as a soldier ended with time in the brig and a dishonorable discharge, because of something that may be Sal and Richard’s fault. He never says it but its implicitly clear: they owe Doc.

Last Flag Flying is mostly a road trip movie, first to Arlington then to New Hampshire. The characters share a lot of laughs and some tears. Sal’s long-standing hedonism and Richard’s newfound spirituality butt heads often, and lead into many a redundant conversation on what is or isn’t the right thing for Doc to do. Doc’s son’s burial ends up being a lot more complicated than expected, especially when they get the true details of his death from his son’s best friend, Charlie Washington (J. Quinton Johnson), who was there on the day he died. Cranston is given a lot of monologues against the Bush administration, mixed between a lot of non-PC comments about women and people of color. Carrell uses his patented softness to great effect as the muted Doc. Fishburne’s character isn’t much but a foil for Cranston but the veteran actor gets a lot of laughs when his Richard begins to act not-so-Godly. Linklater isn’t as imaginative a formalist as Hal Ashby, and while The Last Detail succeeded in a time of mass audience distrust in the government, Last Flag‘s anti-Bush bluster seems a bit dated (Bush’s establishment evil isn’t as sexy as Trump’s current-day flaming incompetence). This is a film with terrific performances from a director who knows how to showcase it, but it’s hard not to feel like it may have wanted to be more.

 

Directed by Richard Linklater