The Last Shot

Mob comedy

With no fewer than nine films currently in the works, Alec Baldwin has been experiencing something of a career resurrection, sparked in no small way by 2003's The Cooler. His ability to deadpan the most absurd characters--witness his recent appearance in the season finale of "Nip/Tuck," playing a cravat-wearing plastic surgeon who fashions his "wife" from a male transsexual--has helped him settle comfortably into strong supporting roles in a variety of projects.

But not even Baldwin can save The Last Shot, a smart but convoluted comedy about the FBI's 1985 sting operation against Mafia boss John Gotti. Baldwin is low-level agent Joe Devine, assigned to Providence ("Are there mobsters on Rhode Island?") to target Gotti's second cousin, who's running a scam with the local Teamsters Union. Posing as a movie producer who plans to use nonunion labor, Joe finds a grateful first-time director/stooge in Steven Schats (Matthew Broderick), an usher at Grauman's Chinese Theater with a sentimental screenplay based on his sister's suicide.

The directorial debut of screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can), The Last Shot suffers from overplotting and overacting, including a dreadful Calista Flockhart as Steven's histrionic girlfriend and several unnecessary scenes with Tony Shalhoub as a generic wiseguy. Yet the movie has moments of sublime looniness, arising mainly from a couple of inspired casting choices: an uncredited Joan Cusack as a real producer helping Joe with the deception ("I'm a huge fan of law enforcement--I used to date the black guy from `Hill Street Blues'"), and Toni Collette as a fresh-from-rehab diva who obligingly pees in her water glass during dinner as proof of her continued sobriety.

Within the realm of Hollywood-on-Hollywood satire (The Player, Wag the Dog), The Last Shot is a bit player at best. What Nathanson captures brilliantly, though, is the seductive power of the medium, its siren song of dreams realized and fantasies fulfilled. Watching his "movie" develop, Joe forgets it's all a hoax; just like a real filmmaker, he wants to make it to the final wrap.