E-Mail This Article to a Friend THE LAST SHOT

Memo to first-time moviemakers: avoid making lousy movies about making lousy first movies. Jeff Nathanson in The Last Shot (did he have Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie in mind? The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight? And watch out for the Adaptation ripoff near the end . . . ) dodges utter self-indulgence by injecting an element of generic plot. Said to be based on a real incident, his film centers on dogged but downwardly mobile FBI agent Joe Devine (Alec Baldwin), who will sacrifice a finger to make a case but is still mired in the Providence office. An opportunity arises to nail Mafia chief John Gotti, and Devine proposes that the FBI finance a bogus Hollywood movie to lure Gotti into a sting. Unlike what goes down in the real Hollywood, here the producer needs a screenplay and a director to make a movie. Hopeless Hollywood dreamer Steven Schats (Matthew Broderick, once a funny actor) provides both. His desperate need to get the film made and Joe’s growing conviction that a work of art, however compromised, is more important than solving the case offer what little there is in the way of conflict, irony, and comedy. (Unless you include Toni Collette in a blond wig screwing Eric Roberts on a pool table.) The saddest, or maybe the funniest, notion in The Last Shot is that Nathanson seems to think that the last shot is actually pretty good. (93 minutes)