Taking off from an amazing true story, The Last Shot mines some pleasing inside-Hollywood gags about indie-film production. But this is no ordinary indie: An FBI agent (Alec Baldwin) sets up an elaborate ruse to sting some mobsters in Rhode Island, by picking a screenplay from the slush pile and financing pre-production. The movie will never be made, but the bogus production will lure the mobsters into the trap. The hitch is, the starry-eyed writer-director (Matthew Broderick), cast, and crew have no idea they're part of an undercover operation--the poor saps think their ship has come in and they're actually making a movie. Adding to the joke is that Baldwin finds himself enchanted by the moviemaking world and beginning to care about his unsuspecting stooge (Broderick is at his most engaging). Writer-director Jeff Nathanson (who scripted Catch Me if You Can) doesn't quite trust this funny set-up, sweetening the pot with too sentimental nudges, but the two stars develop a handy odd-couple chemistry. Toni Collette, as a has-been actress, and Joan Cusack, as a sharp-tongued agent, have some riotous moments. --Robert Horton
2.
Hollywood screenwriter Steven Schats (MATTHEW BRODERICK) is on the A-List of complete failures. With visions of development deals dancing in his head, his only ambition in life is to make movies. Finally, after years of pitching his morbid screenplay to anyone with even a seventh degree of separation from a producer, he is suddenly about to join the ranks of the WGA's working roster. Which explains why he's eager to overlook the fact that Joe Devine (ALEC BALDWIN), who represents himself as the man who can green-light Steven's low-budget movie, is obviously more than a few film frames short of any box office insight.
In a town where perception is reality, and imposters outnumber unproduced screenplays two to one, Devine is not who he claims to be. In truth, he's an agent—not of the William Morris variety— but with the FBI, and he's on a covert mission to ferret out the mob with criminal ties to Hollywood. While hardly the sharpest tool in the crime fighting shed, Devine is as determined to be a star at the Bureau as Schats is to be one in his industry. And he's just clever enough to make the trusting screenwriter believe that at last he's on the fast track to filmmaking success, in Touchstone Pictures' comedy, "The Last Shot."
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