The Last Duel Has One of the Best Fight Scenes of the Decade — and Audiences Ignored It
The Last Duel's titular last duel is intense and epic, and it comes at the end of an important film
Earlier this year, Ridley Scott's soulful post-apocalyptic film The Dog Stars opened to just $8 million at the box office, an unequivocal bomb. The upside, if you want to call it that, is that The Dog Stars is not Scott's biggest box office bomb. Five years ago today, his historical epic The Last Duel opened to a mere $4.8 million. Audiences just didn't turn out to see Matt Damon, Adam Driver and Jodie Comer in a period piece about assault with Rashomon-style storytelling. That's a shame, because audiences missed out on a very nuanced, very well-acted drama about power, gender and the nature of truth. They also missed out on an absolutely sick fight scene.
To some extent, it shouldn't be a surprise that a movie titled The Last Duel would deliver when it comes to depicting the titular last duel. The fight only makes up a small part of the film, however, and after an opening scene teasing the start of the duel the film flashes back to show the events leading up to it from three key perspectives. Based on a real event from 14th century French history, The Last Duel follows the relationship between Jean de Carrouges, a knight played by Damon, and Jacques le Gris, a squire played by Driver. Though the two are initially friends, they have a massive falling-out when Count Pierre d'Alençon (Ben Affleck sporting an incredible goatee and even more incredible attitude), takes some of Jean's lands and bequeaths them to Jacques. Jean is honorable but brutish and not especially smart, and his marriage to Marguerite (Comer) is strained and childless. Jacques has become smitten with her, and while Jean is away he assaults Marguerite, though he claims to have done no such thing.
The film depicts Jean, Jacques, and Marguerite's version of events. Marguerite's account, the last of the three, is presented as being "the truth," but that doesn't do her a lot of good as a woman in this society. The Last Duel is at times ridiculous and entertaining (see: Affleck's goatee), but it's also deeply upsetting to see how little agency Marguerite has. The trauma she endured during the assault is seen as secondary to Jean's honor, Jacques's claims of innocence, and the complex social, religious, and political structures that determine what sort of justice (if any) will be dealt out.
Jean, driven by anger against Jacques rather than any real sort of empathy for his wife, petitions King Charles IV (Alex Lawther of Andor and Alien: Earth fame) to allow for a duel to death to decide the truth. Jacques accepts. Marguerite didn't ask for any of this. She's become a social pariah and, unbeknownst to her at first, she risks being put to death herself if Jean loses the duel because that would imply she was indeed lying about Jacques's attack. It's heavy, high-stakes stuff, and her fate comes down to two deeply flawed men swinging weapons at each until one of them dies in front of an audience of important people. Last Duel is clearly speaking to the #MeToo movement. Its characters fight with swords rather than hashtags, but men's voices dominate, women are pushed to the margins of their own stories, and justice is hard to find.
Jodie Comer in The Last Duel.
Given that context, it almost feels bad to praise The Last Duel for how good this crucial fight scene is. It's extremely brutal, intense, and stressful. Jean and Jacques start out jousting, and Scott conveys how massive and powerful these two men and their mounts are as they charge towards one another breaking lances against the other. Eventually, they fight on foot, and once more the weight of their arms and armor comes through in a very effective way. This is not sleekly choreographed swordplay from The Witcher or The Lord of the Rings. This is two men who are throwing everything they have at each other and looking for every opportunity as they exhaust themselves in battle. The final kill is suitably gnarly.
It should be impossible to spoil the outcome of a real historical event that happened hundreds of years ago. But, if audiences don't know whether Jean or Jacques prevailed, it's an even more stressful conflict because at times it seems that each man could have the other hand. Jean is older but a more seasoned veteran while Jacques is the younger, hungrier fighter. It's unclear who is going to win based on their prowess and based on the tone of the film thus far. Marguerite, who is watching from the stands as her fate is about to be decided, is powerless. You wouldn't put it past history — and by extension — the movie, to end with her burned alive because one man lied about attacking her and another man couldn't kill him. At the same time, while you're rooting for Jean to win, he's not fighting this battle for her.
The spectacle of The Last Duel's climatic fight is an adrenaline-pumping spectacle. It's some of the finest action filmmaking of the decade so far. It's also a tragedy. That it can be both speaks to just how good The Last Duel and its titular last duel are.
