Another filmmaker who understood was Italian director Sergio Leone. Leone's wonderfully iconic westerns (often starring Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name) were virtual models of anthropologist Joseph Campbell's "Hero With a Thousand Faces" concept. Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1967), for example, tells the story of three "heroes" on a quest for treasure that could have been lifted scene-for-scene from Arthurian legend or mediaeval fairy tale. Leone became inexorably linked with Kurosawa when he remade the Japanese director's 1961 samurai saga Yojimbo as a western, entitled A Fistful of Dollars.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to modern-day director Walter Hill. Hill, in his own way, is quite cognizant of film's mythic nature. His 1979 film The Warriors is a near perfect adaptation of the "hero's journey" story that dates back as far as the 2,000-year-old Scandinavian prose poem Beowulf. Now Hill is following in Leone's footsteps by remaking Kurosawa's Yojimbo--this time as a gangster film. The change of venue seems perfect. In point of fact, Kurosawa "borrowed" the Yojimbo storyline from Dashiell Hammet's 1928 detective novel Red Harvest.

In this latest version, Bruce Willis plays "John Smith" (a slight variation on Eastwood's Man With No Name), a mysterious gunman on the run to Mexico who stumbles across a dirtwater Texas border town currently being occupied by two warring factions of bootleggers. As in the previous two versions, our rather mercenary hero hires himself out to both sides and basically watches the carnage unfold.

Willis knows how to do the iconic hero thing. He ought to; he's had enough practice. It takes a powerful screen presence to fill these shoes, and Willis has it. The moment we see Clint Eastwood or Toshiro Mifune step onto the screen, we know they are force to be reckoned with. Willis is one of the few modern actors capable of generating that kind of buzz on screen. Willis' voice-over narration (a lift from American film noir) is well done but detracts from his mysterious loner status. It's difficult to remain mysterious when the audience is privy to your innermost thoughts.

The cinematography in Last Man is particularly expressive. The film adopts the kind of washed-out western dustbowl look often glimpsed in Edward Hopper paintings. The script is effective with only a few sacrifices of logic (why two warring Chicago gangsters would be crammed into one tiny town in the middle of nowhere isn't exactly clear). And as a director, Hill often gets a bit heavy-handed in driving home his "cinematic myth," but I suppose he can be forgiven. After all, he's in pretty good company.

Hill has made broad claims that his version is much more like Yojimbo than Fistful of Dollars (Kurosawa even shares a "story by" credit on the opening crawl). But Last Man Standing actually owes a great deal to Leone's 1964 remake and to Hammett's '28 original. Hill mixes all three versions in a cinematic blender. The result combines Hammett's original bootlegger plotline, Kurosawa's iconic characters and symbolic storytelling and Leone's wild West gunslinging. Hill certainly doesn't shy away from these precursors. Instead, he freely loots from any source he can think of: dime novels, comic books, film noir, westerns, samurai films, even a bit or two from the Bible. The result is a solid, if familiar, shoot-'em-up with one hell of a lot of history to back it up.