The Last Showgirl: Pamela Anderson Shines in an Underwhelming Take on Dated Vegas
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B-
Pamela Anderson is clearly enjoying a career resurgence. Her performance in director Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is receiving the kind of acclaim many, perhaps even Anderson herself, wouldn’t expect to see at this stage in her career.
The acclaim is not unwarranted. Anderson is good as Shelly, a fortysomething chorus girl—regardless at what age, there is no such thing as a chorus woman.
Pamela Anderson as Shelly in The Last Showgirl
As much as Shelly seems a departure from the beach beauty image Anderson cultivated on television’s Baywatch, her character of a veteran Vegas dancer in a show called Razzle-Dazzle is, at least thematically, right on target. It casts her as facing something Anderson likely experienced herself; a beautiful woman aging in a career that courts the young.
Yes, Anderson is good, but it’s the film that ultimately lets her down.
The Last Showgirl centres around Shelly’s dilemma when new management announces the end of Razzle-Dazzle’s 30-plus-year run in exchange for a show more current, and sexier. For Shelly, once the razzle and the dazzle of the show, the news is devastating. With no pension and limited opportunities to find something new, Shelly’s future without Razzle-Dazzle looks bleak.
Director Coppola shoots the film in a style that aims to provoke gritty realism. However, the dialogue does not always align with this intent. Even scenes featuring Jamie Lee Curtis as Shelly’s best friend, Annette, a former dancer turned cocktail waitress also being edged out of a career, tend to follow predictable patterns rather than eliciting the intended pathos.
It boils down to an aesthetic that, with few exceptions, fails to embrace the complexity of themes it attempts to explore.
One such exception has Annette taking to an empty stage and dancing to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. Curtis, once an ingénue, has taken a stand against Hollywood turning a blind eye towards the talents of older women who have the audacity to look their age. As Annette, Curtis pushes the age envelope further than she did in her award-winning performance in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
The other surprise comes from Dave Bautista as Eddie, the show’s stage manager who, despite his gruffness and hints at a former lothario lifestyle, elicits a compassion for the dancers - Shelly in particular - that is routinely dismissed or ignored. Eddie’s sadness is palatable, his hopes and failure to reconnect, even when doing the right thing, is heartbreaking.
A recent video recorded summary of the film from a respected colleague suggests that while outsiders might see Razzle-Dazzle as dated, campy and a show that doesn’t require much talent—if any—to perform, Shelly regards the show as iconic and classic Vegas.
Every choice, every decision, every sacrifice was made in favour of the show. Razzle-Dazzle is Shelly’s life.
My colleague is not wrong but where they might see, in this backstage drama, sympathetic insight into broken dreams, and in the naïve gentleness that Anderson affords Shelly, I can only see a film that trudges through a cliched check list of showbiz humiliations, disappointments and ruminations over roads not taken.
And then there are the fallouts of her choices, lost relationships, failed marriages and the alienation of her daughter. Still, in a film that attempts to harness the bitterness of crushed humanity, The Last Showgirl rarely hits a mark that could be apprised as revealing.
CLICK HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s Q&A with Pamela Anderson about The Last Showgirl.
The Last Showgirl is directed by Gia Coppola and stars Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis and Dave Bautista. The Last Showgirl opens in selected theatres, January 17, 2025.