If in doubt return to the tried and tested would seem to be the message of Walter Hill's latest. Hill has ploughed a lonely furrow of late, preferring to either soldier on with unfashionable Westerns (Wild Bill, Geronimo) or urban thrillers that are really just Westerns with their baseball caps on backwards (Trespass). Last Man Standing attempts to straddle both stools - it's dynamics are all genre, while its setting is small-town Texas in the early 1930s.

John Smith (Bruce Willis), a crim hauling it down to Mexico, fetches up in Jericho, content that there is money to be made off of the rival bootleg gangs who not only control the town but, the ineffectual law and bar-keep aside, pretty much are the town. On one side are Doyle's Irish, on the other the Italians of the combustible Strozzi. With almost surreal turn, these two battle it amongst themselves while Bruce Dern's grizzled old sheriff looks on with disinterest.

A sort of peace has reigned in Jericho, until Smith starts to play both ends against the middle, switching allegiances (and pistols) and selling information through Dern, all directed towards making himself a few dollars more. The result - as the title implies - is a bloodbath.

So far, so familiar then. The titles credit, not unnaturally, Kurosawa's 1961 Yojimbo for inspiration, the seminal samurai-er that would inspire Leone's classic A Fistful Of Dollars three years later. Last Man Standing adds little to the mix beyond some spectacular double-handed post-Woo gunplay (why do Willis' pistols always have just the right number of bullets?) and upgrading combative cowboys for mismatched Mobs.

Leone's picture made a star of a young Clint Eastwood, of course, but, if reports of his Die Hard 4 pay-packet are to be believed, Hill hardly needs do something like for the over-walleted Willis. After turning in a dark, daring performance for Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, this is yet more of his patent not-trying formula. Nothing takes us by surprise other than perhaps its humourlessness, and leaves a hankering for the unpredictability of, say, a Harvey Keitel.

Indeed, most of Hill's cast are startlingly unmemorable. Thank God then for the good sense to cast the always reliable, quietly forceful Dern. Less luck, however, with the usually reliable Christopher Walken as uber-heavy Hickey. Hill's (surprisingly tangled) script keeps him out of the action for too long, building Hickey as something truly terrible. When he finally arrives we find Walken teetering on the brink of caricature, with little to do beyond model some sharp suits. He is enormously disappointing. Much more interesting are the diminutive David Patrick Kelly (Jerry Horne in Twin Peaks) as the explosive Doyle, and William Sanderson's cowardly barman. The few women are shallow second-fiddle fuck-bunnies.

On the plus-side, regular composer Ry Cooder proffers a typically muscular score, but is negated by Lloyd Ahern's dreadful cinematography - this is surely one of the most ugly, over-lit movies of the last ten years. That and a much overused voiceover undercut Hill's chances of a return to the early form of pictures like The Driver and Southern Comfort. It's by no means a dishonourable failure, but a failure nonetheless.