The Last Stop In Yuma County review: Crime drama is more than its influences

The Last Stop In Yuma County is about travelers waiting at a desolate diner for a delayed shipment of gasoline that will allow them to motor on their way. Before anyone can continue on their respective journeys, however, the movie itself has some time-traveling to do, all within the space of its opening 20 minutes or so. The font on its title card looks like something out of the 1950s; a crucial reference to a Ford Pinto pulls the story into the 1970s; and finally, the movie pulls to a stop in the ‘90s—not as its setting (per the Pinto and a Badlands reference, that seems to be sometime in the latter half of the ‘70s) but as the point in time where showily composed crime pictures set partially in diners had their most recent, post-Tarantino peak. In quantity, that is, if not necessarily quality.

Maybe writer-director Francis Galluppi has other filmmakers in mind, though. A husband and wife who turn up at the diner, also waiting for gasoline to arrive, are played by Gene Jones and Robin Bartlett; audiences may recognize them as the guy at the counter in a famous scene from No Country For Old Men and the woman who plays Lillian Gorfein in Inside Llewyn Davis. Depending on your character-actor recall, this is either a subtle nod or a buzzing neon sign pointing to the influence of the Coen brothers.

For much of the movie, it’s only the characters’ lack of Tarantino-knockoff swagger that recalls the Coens. Galluppi uses an unnamed knife salesman (Jim Cummings) to lay out the situation with perfect, immediate clarity. His fuel gauge near empty. The man pulls into a gas station, advertised as the last one for many miles, where the attendant (Faizon Love) informs him that the station itself is out of gas at the moment. He can wait at the diner if he wants; the gas truck is running late and should be there any minute. Nervously hoping to make a date with his daughter, the salesman waits, and strikes up conversation with Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), the waitress, who also lacks transportation. Her husband—the sheriff—dropped her off that morning.

Galluppi’s premise has ingenious simplicity. As soon as the knife salesman learns about the gas delay, it becomes clear that just about anyone else who pulls into the near-empty parking lot of the filling station/diner/motel will be in a similar situation: waiting, impatient, and also hot, because the air conditioning in the diner is busted. It’s similarly inevitable that after the salesman hears something on the radio about a local bank robbery early on, the perpetrators will also show up in need of gas. Sure enough, quietly ruthless Beau (Richard Brake) and dimmer, more impulsive Travis (Nicholas Logan) pull up in their dented Pinto, and bicker over what to do if they get recognized.

Periodically, more unwilling customers enter. It’s easy to picture how, if this were a bigger studio picture like Bad Times At The El Royale, these people could all be played by familiar movie-star faces. Some of the faces in The Last Stop In Yuma County are familiar, but not in that way. Richard Brake, for example, played Joe Chill, killer of Bruce Wayne’s parents, in Batman Begins. He often plays guys who are referred to only by their last name; he’s in the Strangers remake next week. This is the type of role that will likely lead to a substantial uptick in recognition among those who see it. Galluppi probably made this movie on a budget, but bigger stars might well have ruined its tension with showboating, however unintentionally.

As is, the biggest star in the movie is the specter of Quentin Tarantino. This may not be fair to Galluppi, who avoids most pitfalls of the garden-variety QT imitator from 1997 or thereabouts, and has made a skillful, entertaining thriller. On the other hand, if, when a dopey character talks about his grand bank-robbery plan, you feel certain that someone will call him out as appropriating the plot of a movie he saw, it’s probably fine to cite a tremendously influential filmmaker. It’s actually the self-inflicted Coen comparisons that come back to haunt The Last Stop In Yuma County—because Galluppi does eventually find some more Coens-y notes of blackly comic haplessness in this unpredictable yarn. He’s splendidly ruthless in this area, yet the corkscrew turns of fate don’t have much heft of either the comic or the dramatic variety. There’s a sense that the movie thinks just by lingering on certain shots, they’ll take on a greater weight, connecting to some significant observation about the world. When this doesn’t happen, though, it feels almost fitting. Sometimes a long wait at a diner doesn’t pay off.