In my never-ending quest to catch up on some of the big movies I have missed over the past five years (that’s why some of my Recent Releases are not so very recent), I have reached back to a notorious flop of 2021, the historical drama The Last Duel.  Based on real people and events in fourteenth-century France, this film, written by stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, as well as noted director Nicole Holofcener, brings grit and star power to a tale we never learned in French class in school.

Ridley Scott’s film introduces us to a couple of French squires, Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and his friend Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver).  They fight together and more, but fortune, in the form of Count Pierre d’Alançon (Ben Affleck), clearly smiles on Le Gris.  Carrouges turns a different way to survive; he marries pretty Marguerite de Thibouville (Jodie Comer), insuring himself an estate when Pierre turns his back on Carrouges.  During a separation from her husband, Marguerite is raped, and she blames Le Gris.  Carrouges publicly demands justice and the matter winds up before King Charles VI (Alex Lawther), who orders the title duel to the death.  Yet there is much more to the story.

The trio of writers and director Scott have turned this relatively simple story into a 152-minute epic by doing what Akira Kurosawa did with Rashomon seventy years earlier — by telling the story from three perspectives, one at a time.  Just like Rashomon, the rapist tells the tale, his victim tells the tale and the victim’s husband tells the tale.  Now, Rashomon is known as a worldwide classic; people who have never seen it and probably never will at least know what it is.  My secret confession is that, while I think Kurosawa is a brilliant filmmaker, I saw Rashomon for the first time a few years ago and didn’t like it at all.  I found it needlessly repetitive and melodramatic; it also suffers from what is known in literary circles as “the unreliable narrator,” a device which allows lies to be told to the audience which are only much later revealed to be untruthful.  Alfred Hitchcock used this device in Stage Fright, Vertigo and Psycho to fool the audience into a false complacency, only to shatter it later.  Perhaps the most vivid use of the unreliable narrator occurred in 1995, in The Usual Suspects.  It’s much more common now, and it still rubs me the wrong way.

Part of the problem for me in The Last Duel (besides sitting through the same material over and over and over again) is that there really isn’t much difference between the three accounts.  Carrouges makes himself out to be more heroic and warm than he really is, and he preens.  Le Gris makes himself out to be more strategic and knowing than he really is, and he preens.  Marguerite’s version, which the film emphasizes as “the truth,” doesn’t alter much from the others and the rape remains the same, if a bit more harrowing.  Did this material really need three perspectives?  I don’t think so.  It seems to me that a perfectly serviceable version could have been edited down to 105 minutes quite nicely and not lost much dimension at all.  This version is just too much overkill.  ☆ ☆ 1/2.  7 August 2025.

Before I go, I want to address the film’s commercial failure.  It really did flop, bringing back only about 10 % of its large budget, and Ridley Scott ludicrously blamed the millennial crowd, ranting that they prefer comic book movies over intellectual properties and can’t learn anything unless it’s on their cell phones.  He’s certainly entitled to his opinion, but he’s wrong.  Several issues colluded to doom this movie in the marketplace.  First, there’s the title.  It’s a downer, and it isn’t accurate; there were plenty of later duels, even in France, and our own Aaron Burr made this title a falsehood centuries later.  Next is the subject matter; Scott may be right about that.  I started to get lost in the first battle because I don’t know French history and don’t need to; at that point, more exposition or context would have helped.  Next is the COVID epidemic, which interfered with the filming and the release and the global habit of moviegoing rather drastically.  Again, I think the three-perspective approach, ala Rashomon, is one which just doesn’t resonate with modern audiences; it certainly didn’t with me.  Yet another issue was that Disney bought 20th Century-Fox and was contractually obligated to finish and distribute the Fox projects in the pipeline, but obviously had no enthusiasm for doing so.  And finally, much of the press for this project centered on Ben Affleck and Matt Damon teaming up again, just like they did with the very popular Good Will Hunting.  Yet Affleck and Damon aren’t the protagonists here, their characters don’t like each other and there is no payoff to their onscreen interaction or their offscreen publicity of teaming up again.  None of this really matters, of course, to whether the film is good or bad, yet this film’s history, like that of Waterworld or others, may supersede whatever impact the film itself could ever have.