The Last Duel: Review and Commentary

****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MINOR PLOT POINTS AND SPOILERS FOR THE LAST DUEL!! IT IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. This is one of those rare films that is actually geared toward grown-ups. It has some major flaws, but it’s also well crafted and ultimately entertaining.

This article contains plot points and minor spoilers for The Last Duel.

Despite its best efforts to be a #MeToo movie, director Ridley Scott’s new movie The Last Duel is being chastised by some virtue-signaling critics.

The film, set in France in 1386, tells the true he-said, he-said, she-said tale of Sir Jean de Carrouges (a committed Matt Damon), Jacque Le Gris (a mis-cast Adam Driver), and Marguerite de Carrouges (a terrific Jodie Comer) – Jean’s wife, who claims that Le Gris raped her.

Ridley Scott, one of the great cinematic craftsmen of his generation, makes the wise decision to structure the film Rashomon-style, where the perspectives of three main characters are shown around the same single contentious event.

The story is broken down into three chapters titled “The truth according to…” Jean, Jacque and Marguerite. Unfortunately, Scott tips his rather heavy-hand when he lets on that it is Marguerite’s story that is really the “truth” of the incident.

This choice, to have Marguerite’s subjective experience be deemed the objective truth, greatly undermined both the dramatic and artistic potential of the film. This decision felt like it was made in order to appease the #MeToo mob that can become hysterical over any perceived slights.

The film’s star and co-writer, Matt Damon, knows this all too well, as he caught some serious flak when at the height of the #MeToo mania he dared to say something rational about how there’s a difference between a pat on the backside and rape, which infuriated the pussy-hat brigade.

The filmmakers (Ridley Scott and co-writers Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener) aggressively let the audience know they side with Marguerite, but excluding the actual rape, her version of events seem just as narcissistic, fantastical and delusional as Jean’s and Jacques’.

Jean and Jacques both self-righteously see themselves as noble and honorable warriors who are kind of heart. Their perspective is, of course, skewed by self-interest, but the filmmakers refuse to hold Marguerite to the same standard.

Marguerite sees both Jean and Jacques as beasts, and that may be true, but her vision of herself is so saintly as to be hilarious, as even the lie she tells is noble. Marguerite is portrayed not only as a loyal and well intentioned wife, but also brilliant. For instance, she effortlessly turns around illiterate Jean’s business fortunes, collecting debts and breeding horses, while he is off fighting a war for money.

As a female character in the film correctly declares, “There is no ‘right’, there is only the power of men!”, which is an unintentional and uncomfortable truth revealed not only about medieval men in question but also about modern-day feminism and its adherents. As The Last Duel shows, feminism is only born in a bubble of prosperity built by the brute force of ferocious men, and it’s a sign of decadence, if not delusion.

Yet, despite The Last Duel’s insipid #MeToo pandering and its cinematic flaws, and even in spite of myself, I actually liked the film and found it entertaining, which is a testament to both Ridley Scott’s directorial skill and my thirst for remotely decent, adult-oriented cinema in our current cultural desert.

Yes, some of the worst hair-dos in cinematic history are featured in The Last Duel, with Damon sporting a mule-kick of a medieval mullet, and Affleck – who chews-scenery as debauched royal Count Pierre, looking like he got a free bowl of soup with his haircut, but the movie also has an undeniable momentum to it that is cinematically compelling and climaxes with the bone-crunching, deliriously satisfying duel.

Unlike me, The New Yorker’s critic and resident virtue-signaler Richard Brody actually despised the film because it wasn’t feminist enough, calling it a “wannabe #MeToo movie”.

Brody got the vapors because Scott dared show the rape of Marguerite twice – once from Jacques’ perspective and once from Marguerite’s. To be clear, the rape is uncomfortable, it’s a rape after all, but it isn’t gratuitous, there’s no nudity and it’s as tasteful as it could be under the circumstances.

Despite this, Brody writes of the rape scene, “I was gripped with unease—not with horror but with a queasy sense of witnessing a visual exploitation of that horror.”

Brody, I’d like to remind you, wasn’t filled with any unease, but rather ecstatic glee, as he once gushed over the Netflix film Cuties, which graphically hyper-sexualized 11-year-old girls to an alarming degree, calling it “extraordinary”.

Maybe if Marguerite were an 11-year-old, scantily-clad girl Brody would’ve felt less queasy about The Last Duel’s rape scene, who knows?

Brody closes his review by chastising Scott, claiming he should’ve displayed “…the cinematic artistry and, even more, the cinematic ethic…” to not “…show the rape even once.”

According to Brody, Scott should have “put the cinematic onus on…himself – to affirm that Le Gris raped Marguerite, to believe her not because Scott himself created his own image of ostensible veracity to justify and prove her claim but because she said so.”

This is Brody turning the virtue signaling up to eleven by basically saying Ridley Scott didn’t rigorously enough embrace the ethic of “believe all women”.

The buffoonish Brody and his ilk are why no artist should ever try to pander to the insidiously woke. No matter what you do, it’ll never be enough. Nuance is never allowed, only reverence for the cause and compliance with the woke’s ever-changing demands.

The bottom line is that The Last Duel definitely has flaws, it’s most potentially fatal one being that it tried to appease the unpleasant and unpleasable #MeToo woke mob. But thanks to Ridley Scott’s craftsmanship, it’s a well-made enough movie to overcome its considerable shortcomings and short-sightedness to ultimately be deemed worthy of a watch.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021