Ostatni wyścig

I am not a sports person, I first encountered the story of Hanč and Vrbata only thanks to The Last Race. I was lured to the cinema by the good trailer, the cast and the story from Czech history. I complain about some films needing to be shortened, but I would have welcomed an extra quarter of an hour in Hodan's film, as I found it to be abbreviated in some places, most noticeable in the line with Vrbata. To put aside my criticisms, I was surprised that while the frame story of the late 1950s revolved around Rath, the 1912-3 line was focused primarily on Hanč. Still, this is a quality film by Czech standards, and in addition to a strong (if at times abbreviated) and (literally) chilling story, it is also technically impressive, especially the cinematography and the remarkable musical score. Of the actors, I was most impressed by Kryštof Hádek and Oldřich Kaiser. A weaker four stars! (25.03.2022)

A race between Czech and German skiers starts on the ridges of the Krkonoše Mountains. It's an honour, but it soon becomes a race for life and not everyone will make it to the finish line. The Last Race suffers slightly from the fact that it bites into a lot of interesting themes that it fails to develop properly, but at its core, it remains mainly a gritty and unexpectedly proper and intense survival thriller, with technical aspect that far surpass the Czech competition and stand out among the world's top in the genre. (23.03.2022)

The story deserved more build-up. Maybe it should have concentrated less about the past and more about what happened to the central character's fate in the 1950s. Or maybe showed the absurdity of a man of German origin living in Bohemia and claiming to be Czech. A man who got in everybody's way while doing nothing wrong, just being who he was. The bizarreness of being involved in the filming of what he once personally experienced. So he knew how things were then, and how the communist propaganda presented everything differently than in reality. But then there is definitely enough build-up during the race itself. A deadly coldness and definite fatality ooze from it. IN A NUTSHELL: When frost gets under your fingernails even through the screen. (16.05.2023)

A perfectly engaging film that manages to combine a sports flick, a survival drama, a study of Czech-German relations before the First World War and the dark years of the 1950s. Tomáš Hodan tells the story with equal confidence as a writer and as a director. The race is breathtaking, but it is far from just about that. Emerich Rath is rehabilitated a bit at the expense of Václav Vrbata, but even that is written and filmed so cleverly that it doesn't matter in the end. Kryštof Hádek and Oldřich Kaiser deservedly stand out from the cast, but you will also enjoy a lot of well played supporting roles from Judit Bárdos, Vladimír Javorský and Jaroslav Plesl. I appreciate that the filmmakers were so careful about historical accuracy and everything felt really authentic to me. (02.04.2023)

The Last Race is a technically very well-made survival movie and definitely a strong above-average Czech movie, which deserves some appreciation. My only (albeit huge) criticism is directed at the chosen narrative style. Director Tomas Hodan seems to have been more concerned with how to harmoniously combine two timelines than making sure he effectively and comprehensibly narrated the critical moment of the whole drama. Instead, he withholds information from the viewer to seemingly shock them with a bizarre flashback within a flashback. The flashback made me incredibly confused and threw me off in an otherwise comprehensible narrative. Instead of feeling good about understanding the key moment, a series of pertinent questions flooded my mind (Where did Vrabata suddenly come from? Why did he go there in the first place and not tell anyone? Why did he give his coat away when he needed it himself? Where was the time continuity in this case? Why was he absent for most of the movie's running time when he is such a pivotal character? Why does Hodan needlessly sabotage his own movie with such a strange screenwriting ploy?). I think it was simply a completely unnecessary and stupid shortcoming of an otherwise good and very interesting Czech movie, to which I am going to award four stars in the end. It could have been better. (18.04.2022)