The guy who gets fired and returns with a gun seeking revenge is queasy material for even the blackest comedy. Somehow, with only a couple of missteps, director Vlad Yudin makes it funny in Last Day of Summer (out on DVD). Aside from a lapse or two in taste, farcical humor blends with pathos in a film about a young man dissociated from an uncaring society.
The protagonist is a guy named Gregory who calls himself Joe (D.J. Qualls). The perennial pencil-thin geek was a social reject in high school and graduated to the lowest job on the food chain at Burger Haven. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if not for the continual humiliation handed him by his hectoring jerk of a boss. Already poor in spirit and seeing no future, Joe locates a pair of Russian mobsters (“after 20 minutes on the Internet”) and scrapes together money to buy a handgun. The preparations for his planned assault on Burger Haven are pathetically absurd, as is the videotaped screed he mails to CNN.
Last Day of Summer sarcastically spoofs many things, including unclean fast food chains and the pretentiousness of white rappers. It satirizes Hollywood-generated violence fantasies and the pervasive macho complex of even the sorriest American males while searching out the life of a dead-ender determined to show the world he can accomplish something—even if he has to kill to gain attention. Joe’s plan goes awry when he winds up taking the beautiful Stephanie (Nikki Reed) hostage. Unlike anything made in Hollywood these days, Last Day of Summer doesn’t play out exactly as expected.
