In "Last Flag Flying" director Richard Linklater offers a fractured-fairy-tale sort of sequel to Hal Ashby's 1973 Navy buddy/coming-of-age saga "The Last Detail." Thirty years after they served together in Vietnam, former Navy corpsman Larry "Doc" Shepherd (an unusually low-key Steve Carrell, the suicidal gay Proust scholar from "Little Miss Sunshine") re-unites with his old pals, former Marines Sal Nealon (TV's "Malcolm in the Middle" goofy dad Bryan Cranston) and Reverend Richard Mueller (longtime Spike Lee star Laurence Fishburne) to bury Doc's son, a young Marine killed in the Iraq War. We later learn that the Marine Corps' version of the incident involves a considerable amount of "dressing up" of the "killed in action" story to fit the corps' political needs of the day.
Early in the film, Doc is amazed that Sal agreed so quickly to leave his business and slip into the unknown with a buddy he hasn't seen in years. "You turn over the keys of your bar to a guy who's asleep on your pool table, and then you jump in your car and you drive me to hell and gone, and you don't even know where we're headed."
One of great joys of this dramedy is just how funny these old farts can be when they remember how crazy they once acted as young sailors. Taking a break in a Midtown bar near Penn Station, Rev. Mueller ponders his friend Sal's drinking habits.
"That went down awfully quickly."
"I'm drinking for two now that you've gotten old and boring."
1970s movie buffs or Turner Classic Movies viewers may recall how wild-and-wooly Ashby's original "Last Detail" slapdash adventure was. That movie's point of view was fueled by a ferocious performance by Jack Nicholson as a pitbull-like Navy Shore Patrol cop. One of film's greatest assets is offering a vivid window on a past that is irrevocably gone forever. "Last Flag Flying" lacks the earlier film's explosive thrust-and-parry style.
Still, Richard Linklater fans will appreciate the sense that this still-young master has recovered the wit and inventive style he possessed back in the 90s when he was adding to our shared pop vocabulary with his 1997 debut feature "Slacker," or the pokes at patriotism and high school hazing rituals in his 1993-produced, 1976-set last-day-of-school comedy "Dazed and Confused."
Linklater co-wrote the "Last Flag" screenplay with Darryl Ponicsan, based on the latter's novel. The film's soundtrack includes a Bob Dylan classic ballad, "Not Yet Dark."
(L to R:) Bryan Cranston as Sal, Steve Carell as Doc, and Laurence Fishburne as Mueller in "Last Flag Flying." Photo: Wilson Webb