Last Rampage: The Escape of Gary Tison is an adaptation of a book written by James W. Clarke with the same title about the prison break of Gary Tison and Randy Greenwalt in the summer of 1978 in Arizona. I never heard about any of them or the incident. Tison’s sons helped to orchestrate the prison break.
I’m a huge Robert Patrick fan, and he plays the titular character. I think that he is a better actor than his resume reflects so I’m constantly rooting for him and am willing to spend money on a movie that I ordinarily would not even be on my radar if he wasn’t in it. (Side note: would someone please cast him as Darryl’s father in The Walking Dead.) I enjoy a movie based on a true story and who doesn’t indulge in the true crime stories. It is unavoidable even if you just watch the news. You try to imagine putting yourself in either the criminal or the victim’s shoes and wonder how you would handle things differently. Most of us can’t make the connection between one day being a law abiding citizen then committing heinous acts which causes the fascination and makes seeing an actor like Patrick bridge the divide between humanity and acting inhumanely.
I considered seeing Last Rampage at a nearby local chain theater, but there were not many showings, and I don’t love the theater so I added it to my queue instead. While I expected Patrick to deliver a superb performance, I did not expect to enjoy the whole movie. The entire cast was phenomenal, and there were quite a few well-known actors in the movie: Heather Graham, Bruce Davison and John Heard. If not for the cast, it would deserve television movie status, but they elevate it to theater status. It is just unfortunate that it did not get wider distribution. Apparently it is not the first movie made about this incident. The first movie was a television movie called A Killer in the Family, which is available on YouTube and in the queue. James Spader and Eric Stoltz played two of the sons! I can’t wait to see how they measure up.
I had one major quibble with Last Rampage. It starts with the how we got here narrative trope, which gives away too much of the ending for those viewers such as myself who were not familiar with the story. Sure, we could guess how the story will play out, but the movie does not have to suck the tension out of the story immediately. It does not work, and I need all creators to stop using this narrative device. It is rare to see it used effectively. The end of this family’s story is the least interesting aspect of this movie.
In a sense, Last Rampage is already a movie that starts in the middle of their story. We don’t see what life was like for this family before Tison went to prison and while he was in prison. We never see what normal life was like for this family, but they are clearly a family with a tight dynamic in place that continues to operate after the escape. As viewers, we take for granted that most stories with fathers and sons are going to have daddy issues, but this movie has an opposite, initially old-fashioned sensibility, which is the surprise. These sons not only have no issues with their father, but if they did, they could let him rot in prison. They seem to love him so much that they are willing to do anything to be near him and please him. We never see how that dynamic was established, but the performances are so solid that it fills in the gaps.
Last Rampage’s real tension lies in the psychological dynamic of a family that earnestly loves and trusts their patriarch, but genuinely and gradually questions whether or not that patriarch deserves that trust. The actual crimes committed during the escape are less interesting than watching the father and trying to discern his true motives. His ostensible goal is to escape, but as the movie unfolds, I began to question whether stupidity or a stronger (sub)conscious desire really drove him.
Last Rampage is a great movie for anyone interested in how cults work outside of a conventional context and shows how psychological abuse can be more damaging than physical in the long run. I’ve read a handful of discussions about this movie, and viewers classify their parents as crazy, but they are not. You don’t have to have a religious purpose or the intent to act like a cult to be a cult. The real story is how to get out of a cult when you didn’t even know that you were in one. The real escape story does not involve a prison, but years of conditioning and teaching about a set of values and belief that when tested and questioned are untrue, but you are expected to unquestioningly obey.
Last Rampage offers a wide spectrum of people: those who were never in the cult, i.e. the law; those who are being recruited by the cult, i.e. the reporter and the viewers; those who are true believers and deep in the cult, the family; those who escaped or are trying to at least distance himself from the cult, i.e. other family members; and those opportunists who seek to exploit the benefits from the cult and cosign the cult without necessarily believing, but whose interests are aligned with the cult, i.e. Randy Greenwalt. If you watch the movie with this framework in mind, I think that you will genuinely appreciate how nuanced and textured the movie is even though it feels as if it is a fairly standard and straightforward story.
The real tension in the story is what is the real story: is Tison a good man or not? While the law’s story is right, the mainstream story also fails to comprehend exactly what made him dangerous. Just because something ends in murder does not mean that the murder or harming the victim was the point. The victims are collateral damage, incidental. Last Rampage is a story of manipulation and domination. A cult does not have to have a lot of members to exist, but it does have to have a charismatic leader. Patrick does a great job superficially and initially seeming like Tison was a good old boy straight from The Dukes of Hazzard, but he gradually alters his projection of benign affableness to become slightly more sinister the longer that he is out of the shadow and control of the law. Every actor who immediately goes to vein popping, eye bulging screaming (I’m looking at you Tobey Maguire) needs to watch Patrick’s understated and sophisticated performance. He injects humanity into a performance that could be just two-dimensional.
Last Rampage isn’t graphic so if you’re into the cast or enjoy true crime dramas or psychological thrillers, I highly recommend this film. It seems like a conventional movie, but it reframes a predictable story in a way that brings more insight into why bad things happen to good people.