The entire first two-thirds of the film is interested in a "Gilligan's Island" sort of intrigue, with Candy the bimbo (Meg Ryan lookalike Rebecca Cross), McBride the butch bimbo (Sherri Alexander), Lucky the grunt (Joe Michael Burke), and Cooky the crusty comic relief (Ze-ev Revach) each having a minor crisis that is solved by the implacable Captain Nick (Lundgren). To add some friction (I guess) to this bucolic refuge comes a suspicious-seeming person wearing the uniform of the army but betraying little to no military knowledge. If you're thinking of The Postman, you're on the right track--interestingly enough, by the end of The Last Warrior, you'll also be thinking of another future-set Kevin Costner opus, Waterworld.

After nothing at all happens for the longest time save for an almost-peek at Candy naked in a shower and the appearance of a trio of sick goats, the milk of which makes a middle-aged married couple sort of sick for a little while, Captain Nick is forced to rescue a kidnapped Candy from a prison full of opium-addled nutjobs. That Candy hasn't been plundered by an institution populated entirely by psychotic inmates is only mildly surprising when taken with larger questions like, "Why is there a society of mutants at all, much less just a few months after, an earthquake?" and "Who's Rainbow and why can she make it rain?"

I also wondered why she wanted to cause a downpour to start with, and how those native spiritual/religious images of baptism and rebirth tied into Dolph finally kicking ass in the last five minutes. And then it came to me, after a fashion: Lundgren has a masters in chemical engineering and is the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship to MIT. The man's a genius, you see, and inscrutable new age pop images are most likely appealing to him. He doesn't look as toned up as he has in the past, certainly not as big as he was for Universal Soldier, Masters of the Universe, and Rocky IV, and probably owing to a burgeoning paunch, Lundgren doesn't take his shirt off even once. I figured out that The Last Warrior, almost entirely without action and full of impenetrable subplots and meandering conversations, must be the D-grade action star's attempt to transcend the genre into which he's been shoehorned for his entire career. The Last Warrior, you see, isn't so much a boring and preposterous series of nothings as it is a desperate cry for help from a smart man who has no aptitude for his chosen vocation. A desperate cry for help that happens, incidentally, to be boring and preposterous.

Artisan's DVD is presented in a nice full-screen transfer. Its desert colours are bright and sharp, shadow detail (what there is of it) is nicely modulated, and there's no trace of compression artifacts. A flat Dolby 2.0 surround mix rumbles with enthusiasm during the film's two perfunctory explosions and provides a nice, clear reproduction of the insipid dialogue. A faithfully dull trailer and the standard cast and crew biographies round out the disc.-Walter Chaw