Every Last One of Them (2021)

0 Stars

Daughter Slaughter

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

It apparently took four writers to create this awful Rambo knockoff, wherein almost nothing makes any sense, from the larger plot arc all the way down to the weirdly mismatched dialogue exchanges.

Jake Hunter (Paul Sloan) comes to a small town, searching for his missing daughter. In a bar, he gets into a fight with a young man who turns out to be the son of the most powerful man in town, Nichols (Jake Weber). Jake is arrested, but breaks free, steals a police car, and heads to the Nichols farmland. He shoots Nichols's son and hides out among the acres of crops. When armed men come in after him, he takes them out, one by one, with the use of kind of secret combat training. Before long, Jake's old commanding officer (Richard Dreyfuss) is called in to help. Can Jake survive long enough to discover what happened to his daughter?

Every Last One of Them doesn't even bother to let us know who the main character is or what he's looking for in the first reel; we're just supposed to like Jake because he looks like a movie tough guy. He's not very smart, either. He shoots and kills the only person who could have known anything about his daughter, without getting any information. (He never seems to be able to decide whether he believes she's alive or dead.)

Then, despite this act of cold-blooded killing, we're still supposed to root for him and consider him the hero as he runs off into the farmlands. Dreyfuss shows up having been "called in" by somebody, but... by whom? How would he know anything about this, and how would any of the characters know how to call him? (He plays the Richard Crenna character from the Rambo story.)

So much else is wrong with Every Last One of Them, from the awkward flashbacks to the supposed "water deal" that is part of the plot, but is eventually forgotten, to the creepy marriage-like relationship between Nichols and his sister (Taryn Manning). But the worst thing about it is that, despite being a flat-out murderer, Jake walks away in the end, with a police officer saying "you're not the bad guy." Some dialogue at the coda reminds us that "this world is a cruel and unforgiving place." It sure is, with movies like this being made.