Director Vadim Shmelyov
Starring Artyom Gubin, Lubov Konstantinova & Igor Yudin
Rated MA
Score 5.5/6

The cadets of the Podolsk artillery and infantry schools are completing their training, and they will soon become commanders. Two friends compete for a girl. Suddenly, the command learns about the breakthrough of the front and the movement of a German tank column to Moscow. The only serious force is the cadets, they must stop the Germans at the Ilyinsky defence line and hold out until the reserves approach.

I have been meaning to watch this one for more then a few months, if you go looking for this one its also known as The Last Frontier or The Final Stand and from what I understand its Russian title translates into English as Podolsk cadets. Now I am certain that there are going to be more then a few people out there who are going to dismiss this movie because the voice over work might not have been the best quality and I do recommend that if you are given the choice of watching a movie with questionable dubbing or watching it with subtitles you should chose the subtitles. Unfortunately, with the digital copy that I had I did not have the option to watch this with subtitles because I got the impression that the work of the voice artists did seem to fit with the tone of the more emotional scenes of the movie. Though I would like to make it perfectly clear that The Last Stand doe not have the worst dubbing in a movie that have seen in the past few months, that honour goes to The Last Mercenary starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.
I don’t think of myself as myself as being overly familiar with Russian Cinema and I am certain that I haven’t watched more then a handful of Russian movies, that being said director Vadim Shmelyov has delivered a beautiful shot movie that is more then capable of delivering the kind of movie watching experience that I would expect from any American war movie, on more than one occasion I found myself on the verge of tears. As nationalistic as all war movies always are The Last Stand was afraid to ask the question ‘why is this war being fought?’ and ‘why are all these young children dying’.
Even though it seemed that it might have been a throwaway moment I loved the scene with the pineapple and the subsequent interrogation scene was hilarious. I loved Lubov Konstantinova’s and Artyom Gubin’s performances as ‘Masha’ Grigorieva and ‘Sashka’ Lavrov their love story helped make this more just another ‘war’ movie.