Look at the long list of executive producers attached to The Last Son and you’ve got to wonder if they aren’t at least partly responsible for the film’s uncertainty about what it is. Even the title is in dispute – The Last Son of Isaac LeMay is an alternative.
It’s got good bones, though, a lean story about Isaac LeMay, an old western hand who, believing himself afflicted by a Cheyenne curse that that one of his own children will kill him, sets off to kill them all before they can kill him. Since Isaac has distributed his seed liberally among the working girls of the Old West, this is some task. (How he’d know without DNA testing which of those women’s offspring were his we’re not told.) As the film opens Isaac is sending his latest despatchee, son Lionel, to the great beyond, which leaves just two children: daughter Megan and son Cal.
First Megan. Her mother has retired as a prostitute and is living a life of virtue. She informs Isaac that Megan is absolutely and definitely not his. An unconvinced Isaac tests Megan, by giving her his gun and offering himself up as an easy target. Megan declines to kill him, proof enough for Isaac that she’s not “the one”.
And on to Cal, a murderous psychopath who takes after his father and has an unnatural affection for his mother, Anna, a seasoned prostitute still plying her trade.
Meanwhile, hobbling along behind Isaac at some distance, the forces of law and order, represented by ad hoc detective Solomon.
These are our characters – Isaac (Sam Worthington), Cal (Colson Baker), Megan (Emily Marie Palmer) and Solomon (Thomas Jane), with occasional stopovers chez Anna (Heather Graham) – the dramatis personae of a loose reworking of the Oedipus story.
The three male leads seem to be in the grip of a Clint Eastwood obsession, each trying to out-gruff the other, with Baker, the least experienced, coming off worst. His IMDb biography amused me – “Tall (6’4″) and handsome, European-American businessman, entrepreneur, model, musician, rapper, singer, songwriter, guitarist, actor, producer and director”. Anyone else win Hyphenate Bingo?
You might know him as Machine Gun Kelly, or Mgk. He’s introduced spraying machine gun bullets about as a bit of a nudge nudge.
The other presiding spirit here is Cormac McCarthy, the stark brutality of whose novels director Tim Sutton appears to be aiming for, without ever quite getting there.
Worthington isn’t one of my favourite actors but to give him his due he is at least trying something different here. Working with a tight range of emotions, he puts together a thumbnail characterisation of Isaac, a man in thrall to myth and not paying enough attention to reality.
Thomas Jane comes out of it best, and eventually starts to assert himself as the hero of this piece, the implacable lawman raised by Indians, we’re told, so someone who might understand the workings of a Cheyenne curse? Twenty years ago Jane was a coming man, destined for the A list, so it seemed. Then suddenly it all went wrong. Why? How? Who knows, but he’s a welcome presence here.
It all builds to a gunfight finale in a snowy western town. Does Isaac end up dead? Who do you think kills him? I had guessed it by about 20 minutes in.
This is a strange “nearly” film of good performances and interesting individual scenes that doesn’t quite come together as a whole. Thomas Jane is one of those many exec prods, but to be fair to him, his character is one of the few who isn’t in the way of things, which is more than can be said for Anna, whose scenes exist merely to point up what a wackadoodle her son Cal is.
Approach with caution, in other words.
The Last Son – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
