Francis Galluppi’s tense and darkly funny The Last Stop in Yuma County begins with an unnamed traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) rolling up at the titular Arizona rest stop, looking to fill his tank. The place is nothing more than a couple of gas pumps, a tiny motel, and an old-school diner, complete with red leather booths and an infinite supply of strong black coffee. Despite the locale’s humble appearance, it’s about to become the site of a thrilling showdown that finds a fascinating mix of misfit characters caught in the crossfire.
The attendant, Vernon (Faizon Love), gives our protagonist the bad news first: They don’t have a drop of gas left to sell and the next stop isn’t for a hundred miles. There’s no way the salesman’s car will make it that far, so he’s stuck here until the next delivery arrives. But the good news, Vernon informs him, is that he’s free to wait it out inside the diner, where its charming waitress, Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), will be happy to serve him a slice of their famous rhubarb pie.
Not only after the salesman hunkers down to wait for the fuel delivery, two men enter the diner. Travis (Nicholas Logan) is a hulking figure with a glassy grin plastered across his face and a too-small t-shirt that only emphasizes his largeness, giving him the appearance of a supersized child. By contrast, Beau (Richard Brake) is his polar opposite: a weathered little man with a glare that could cut glass and an intense way of talking that makes a coffee order sound like a threat. Something about them immediately puts the salesman on edge, especially when he realizes that the car they’re driving is the one he just heard about on a radio news broadcast—the one a pair of bank robbers used just that morning to make their getaway.
From here, Galluppi does an expert job of slowly ratcheting up the tension as Charlotte and the salesman try to devise a way to call for help without upsetting the robbers. They try all sorts of things—Charlotte even comes up with an ingenious plan involving an over-sugared cup of coffee—but salvation is continually snatched away at the last moment. It’s a deliciously nerve-wracking setup because, though Charlotte and the salesman can’t talk openly, we can see the calculations they’re making at every step, weighing each escape plan against the risk of sitting a little longer to see what happens. All under Beau’s watchful eye.
Gradually, more customers arrive—first an older couple, Robert (Gene Jones) and Earline (Robin Bartlett), and later another pair of aspiring robbers, Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick), with various solo stragglers turning up in between. The film has a skillful way of rendering the dynamics between the characters with just a few lines, from Robert and Earline’s comfortably worn-in relationship to Miles and Sybil’s newer, spikier one. They all feel like bits of Americana, filtering into the desert diner from the country’s shared unconscious.
With each new addition, the game of cat and mouse at the center of The Last Stop in Yuma County grows more complex. Some people cotton on to the danger they’re in, while others are blissfully unaware. The diner becomes a pressure cooker, and you never know who’s going to make the move, either accidentally or on purpose, that sets the whole thing off.
You can feel Quentin Tarantino’s artistic DNA coursing through this story. It’s the more restrained side of QT’s filmography that Galluppi is drawing from: more Jackie Brown than Pulp Fiction. That influence is present in all the little details, from the conversations provoked by that peculiar choice of pie to the way the violent finale is initiated by a slow-motion sequence set to the yearnful Roy Orbison tune pouring out of the diner’s jukebox. Miles even turns out to be something of a film buff, correcting Sybil when she compares the two of them to Bonnie and Clyde, as he’d rather be like the duo from Terrence Malick’s Badlands.
Eventually, someone snaps and the diner plays host to a multi-party Mexican standoff—this is Arizona, after all, so almost everyone turns out to be packing heat—followed by a hail of bullets. There are little moments of blackhearted comedy among the bloodshed, but through it all, The Last Stop in Yuma County makes sure that those gunshots resonate. It isn’t winking about the violence itself, as we’re watching people die messy, unnecessary deaths that come about for no good reason. They just happened to run out of gas at the worst possible time.
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