The makers of Changing Lanes (http://imdb.com/title/tt0264472/), with Sam Jackson and Ben Affleck, should sue over this monstrosity of uninventiveness. The makers of Last Exit should exile themselves from the biz from taking such an un original piece of work and trying to make it there own. Shame on them.
But Kathleen Robertson is such a hottie.
as long as kathleen was in it, leave the movie alone:)
Scotland The Brave
I too saw the parallels between the two movies but that's about the only similarity. Changing Lanes also deals with the issue of personal responsibility but only centers it around one character and how he deals with his family, it's not a study in which one of two characters has some sort of upper moral hand. I thought that both movies were excellent.
There was one line in Changing Lanes that I found was relevant to both movies. Sam Jackson's character was told by his social worker that "Chaos is your drug." That factor I found in both movies and left Beth clearly as the moral loser. She continually showed that she had to be involved in the middle of trouble, as did Sam Jackson's character. For whatever personality traits one wouldn't like about Diana one can't say that chaos was her drug. She took the trials and tribulations that life had given her and dealt with them as well as she did or didn't. Her talking down to Beth IN NO WAY justified Beth's getting physically violent towards her in return.
Also observe that Beth used her son's telescope as a means of weaponry to attack Diana. The sight of that object, which was something that she'd put herself out for to get him as a birthday gift earlier in the day, didn't stop her from potentially destroying it later on. Benji still had it in the last scene, thus we can assume that it wasn't damaged. But ultimately Beth's need to create chaos overruled any nice memories that she had of her son's joy at finding that he, a born stargazer, now had this wonderful new gift. Beth had every right to give Diana the business verbally but look what she just had to add to the mess.
The ending was sad, no doubt, but that's because we, as viewers, saw that Beth had become enlightened and was starting to take some personal responsibility in her life. That, however, can't make Diana the wrongdoer in using the gun in self-defense. Diana had just had her car, with her in it, violently attacked, as well as run off the road, leaving her potentially dead. Would you trust somebody who had just done such things to you to come anywhere near you after that? Whether it were self-defense or just outright blind fury at that point makes no difference. Either factor would justify the use of force to repel such a person from getting near you for a third violent incident or to just blow them away, at that point such a person shows him or herself to totally deserve it. The ending may have been sad to us from an omniscient point of view but that's all.