If the eighties and nineties were the golden age of action movies, The Last Boy Scout has to rank somewhere near the top of the pantheon. Directed by the late, great Tony Scott, it’s the one movie that paired many of the titans of the genre. You had Scott, but also producer Joel Silver, star Bruce Willis, a score by Michael Kamen, AND one of the funniest action movie scripts ever written, courtesy of Shane Black.
Incredibly, The Last Boy Scout was only a middling success at the box office and has never been treated all that well on home video, with it never getting the special edition it likely deserved. Luckily, the good folks at Arrow Video have righted that wrong, with it getting a full 4K restoration with all the bells and whistles you’d expect — with the company giving it a reverent, Criterion-level special edition.
What’s in The Last Boy Scout Workprint?
We’ll be back in a couple of days with a full review of the disc, but when I received it in the mail, there was something I had to check out right away. A few months ago, I wrote a story about how a workprint for the movie had been found by a film society and that Arrow wanted to include it on the 4K disc.
While that didn’t happen, they did include, as a special feature, all the deleted footage, which isn’t as comprehensive as you might think. Over the years, there have been a lot of rumors about how the film was cut from an NC-17 at the eleventh hour, but the workprint isn’t a nearly finalized cut of the movie. Rather, it’s an early version of the movie that was test-screened and is actually missing much of the soundtrack.
It also misses some reshot sequences, with the footage including an alternate reconciliation ending between Bruce Willis’ Joe Hallenbeck and his estranged wife, Sarah (Chelsea Field), that’s more open-ended than what we see in the final cut. It’s also missing a classic line. When Hallenbeck looks in the rearview mirror early in the movie and says the classic, “Nobody likes you. Everybody hates you. You’re gonna lose,” it’s actually missing the classic last line, “Smile, you f**k.”
So, What Was Actually Cut?
So, what’s actually missing from the theatrical cut? A tiny bit of extra gore. During the classic opening sequence, where Billy Blanks’ Billy Cole shoots himself in the head, there was a bit of gore cut that, I’d argue, is actually detrimental, as it’s clear they’re using a dummy head for Billy at this point.
There’s also a bit more gore in two of the shootouts, with gorier bullet wounds when Hallenbeck kills Milo’s goons with the puppet, and then some added gore when Joe and Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans) take out Shelly Marcone’s thugs in the penthouse. We’re talking frames, though — nothing extensive.
Is the Workprint Better Than the Theatrical Cut?
All that said, the theatrical cut of The Last Boy Scout is still the best way to see the movie, and without Tony Scott himself around to re-edit it, Arrow did the right thing by including the footage as a supplement rather than attempting to create a new cut.
Even still, WB deserves kudos as well for licensing Arrow the footage, which is still very cool to see.
Pick up the new disc HERE when it comes out on October 13th!
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