The Last Boy Scout is a 1991 American buddy action film directed by Tony Scott from a screenplay by Shane Black, and produced by Joel Silver.

It stars Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans, with Noble Willingham, Chelsea Field, Taylor Negron, Danielle Harris, and Halle Berry.

The film follows a washed-up private investigator (Willis) who teams up with a scandalized former football star (Wayans) to uncover a political conspiracy involving their former employers.

The film was released by Warner Bros. Pictures in the United States on December 13, 1991, to mixed reviews and a smaller than expected box office.

Meanwhile, private investigator Joe Hallenbeck, a disgraced former Secret Service agent who was once a national hero for saving the President from an assassination attempt, discovers that his wife Sarah is having an affair with his best friend and business partner, Mike Matthews.

That night at a strip club, Joe is approached by Cory's boyfriend, former Stallions quarterback Jimmy Dix, who was banned from the league on gambling charges and alleged drug abuse.

At Cory's apartment, Jimmy and Joe find a taped phone conversation between Senator Calvin Baynard, who leads a congressional investigation into gambling in sports, and Stallions owner Sheldon Marcone.

Joe knocks Milo to the edge of the stadium light platform, where SWAT officers shoot him before he falls into the moving rotor blades of a police helicopter.

Other actors in the film include Eddie Griffin as The Strip Club DJ, Sara Suzanne Brown as Stripper, Ryan Cutrona as Harp, Michael Papajohn as Hitman, Jack Kehler as The Scrabble Man, Manny Perry as Cigar Thug, Rick Ducommun as The Pool Owner, and Morris Chestnut as The Locker Room Kid.

Time passed and eventually I sat down and transformed some of that bitterness into a character, the central focus of a private eye story which became The Last Boy Scout.

[6]Roger Ebert, commenting on the script, said "The original screenplay for The Last Boy Scout set a record for its purchase price; that was probably because of the humor of the locker-room dialogue, since the plot itself could have been rewritten out of the Lethal Weapon movies by any film school grad.

Editor Mark Helfrich described sorting through "mountains of raw material" to edit the first cut: "There was more footage shot for The Last Boy Scout than on any film I had ever worked on."

He recalled with incredulity that the work of previous editors appeared to have been rejected, taken apart and put back into the daily reels: "There were still splices all over the place."

He later referred to the experience as one of the most frustrating jobs of his career and has often declined to discuss it in detail, although he did mention in a podcast interview[citation needed] that several editors were hired and then fired before him, and that Warner Bros. began testing the movie before it was completely finished.

Studio executives fretted about the expanding budget, while less-than-enthusiastic reactions from a test screening audience, as well as the unlikeable character played by Willis, did little to allay these concerns.

[15] On August 25, 2015, La-La Land Records released a limited edition soundtrack album featuring most of Kamen's score, plus Medley's song.

[16] The film under-performed expectations given the star power and hype surrounding the then record price paid for the screenplay by Shane Black ($1.75 million).

[22][23][24] Although the film was not a blockbuster, it helped Bruce Willis recover his star status after the disastrous Hudson Hawk and became hugely popular in the video rental market.

The site's critical consensus reads: "The Last Boy Scout is as explosive, silly, and fun as it does represent the decline of the buddy-cop genre.

[29] Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four, saying it was "a superb example of what it is: a glossy, skillful, cynical, smart, utterly corrupt and vilely misogynistic action thriller.

"[7] Owen Gleiberman praised it as "a cheerfully disreputable buddy thriller that also happens to be one of the most entertaining movies of the season ... [and] gives the actors room to stretch out.

"[22] Variety described the plot as "a haze of barely connected story lines about political corruption, pro-football, gambling, infidelity, and blackmail [where] all the questions are answered by another car chase, smashing someone in the face or shooting someone in the forehead.

[30][2][3] In 2022, Alan Sepinwall from Rolling Stone included The Last Boy Scout on The Best of Bruce Willis: 10 Memorables TV and Movie Performances and said: "The neo-noir thriller The Last Boy Scout is on some level (also) trash — bookended by wildly over-the-top action sequences at football stadiums — elevated not only by director Tony Scott's self-awareness of how ridiculous it all is, but by the sheer force of Willis' performance as a disgraced Secret Service agent turned seedy private detective"[31] Shane Black and Tony Scott both expressed dissatisfaction with the final film, and said in later years how the original script was far better.