Francis Galluppi’s feature debut ‘Last Stop in Yuma County’ sees two brothers stranded with a duffle bag of bank-robbed cash awaiting the arrival of a never-to-come tanker. A knife salesman (Jim Cummings) and waitress Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue) are held hostage as new petrol-parched options roll in while the brothers yen and cock their six-shooters for a tank enough to break for the border.
The film is great on arrival; breezy desert-dry nostalgia and easy on the eye grading makes for a fast hour and half, helped by funny, fluent dialogue and the steady honk of the horn asking for fuel. The plot is stirred by a cast of thrilling pairs and more pairs, which although a sure-fire (and hassle-free) way of wrenching anxiety, touches often a triteness to discolour the black-comedy bite it means to be.
Brothers Beau (Richard Blake) and Travis’s (Nicholas Logan) play of dunce and decision-maker is great, each affecting special tightenings of plot bled out even from second-thin shots or flits of face.
Galluppi’s editing is so good it outpaces his writing. Tension owes incidentally to the unseen by splicing radiant sequences that seem as continuous as early Hollywood pictures. That dexterity includes the foible-full deputy (Connor Paolo) and rugged sheriff (Michael Abbott Jr.) and uses their veneer against linoleum 70s charm to all but the best of any ability, soft shoeing together plot-lines to absolute intrigue.
Direction is generally clean yet creative, and deftly looses the gasps and grave hums as well as any battle-tested production. The “sugar scene” is a slub of perfect anxiety, and with the tender sequence surveying the upturned tanker, epitomise Galluppi’s eye for detail and sowing of seeds kneading the story into, and then suddenly into, gear. Shots of pure brilliance (remembering one faceless reaching of hand or a cloud-heavy horizon) come equally common and pivotal and can only be met with bated breath.
It is all gas and gaiters until character comes calling.
The marvellous start isn’t married to a better-half, especially in the latter third where the previously lucid plot lags dispossessed of its beating-heart, not so tacked to setting, and certainly not character, chugging to the nearest but not-best stop. The rudderless tumble is at times perfectly thrilling, and otherwise overhasty and harmless. By staying in a premise it has exhausted, characters don’t dip their toes in anything beyond the remit of their archetypes, too rear-view mirror watching to stand on their shoulders.
Winks of performances not quite right, as in the salesman serving mostly as a litmus test for tension by the angle of his unhinged jaw, leaves little to be developed. Dialogue doesn’t unearth meaningful inner truth, which is only problematic when the film banks on it, leaving one feeling stranded at a prettily sunbaked ground floor, obliged to a situation that hasn’t fully infiltrated their heart.
The ride is nevertheless captivating. The sense of a spinning top refreshed between blinks cajoles a fantastically quick narrative, but only when questions of who turns it, why it works and what would be better, carry to credits unchallenged.