Film / The Last Stop in Yuma County

The Last Stop in Yuma County is a 2024 American crime thriller film written and directed by Francis Galluppi in his directorial debut, starring Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue, Richard Brake, and Nicholas Logan.

The film takes place in the tail end of the 70s, follows a travelling knife salesman (Cummings) who stops at a rural rest stop to fill up his car. He also hears on the radio about the robbery of a bank in Buckeye by two men who escaped with $700,000 in a green Pinto. Unfortunately, as the gas station has no gas and the fuel truck hasn't arrived, the salesman decides to wait at the diner next door, making conversation with the waitress Charlotte (Donahue).

However, shortly after he enters, two more men, Beau (Brake) and Travis (Logan) walk into the diner, also having to wait for gas to come in. But the salesman recognizes the car as a green Pinto from news and both he and the waitress realize that the two new customers are the men who robbed the bank in Buckeye. However, Travis and Beau realize that they know who they are and quickly act.

Thus, the salesman is stuck in a dire situation as the two bank robbers hold up the diner and all incoming customers to protect their stolen riches.

MAJOR SPOILERS follow. As the film depends heavily on twists and reveals for its impact, spoilers are unavoidable. If you want to keep your surprise, watch the film first, then come back here. And don't click any of the icons on the top of the page. You Have Been Warned.

This film provides examples of:

• Accidental Murder: The salesman accidentally shoots Sarah in the struggle with her husband.
• Action Survivor: The salesman seems to be this at first. However, as his greed continues to drive him to murder anyone he comes across in the final act, he quickly drops the "survivor" part and just keeps on actively looking for a kill.
• Affably Evil: The salesman. He's a mild-mannered, terrified guy that's very soft-spoken and would rather just talk things through, but he murders without much hesitation everyone on his path, ending up with the highest body count of all characters and almost getting away with the money.
• Asshole Victim: Miles. He's toxic with his girlfriend and attempts to join the robbers and threaten everyone in the diner just for a cut of their money.
• Ax-Crazy: Downplayed as they hide under their atitudes, with Beau seeming extremely calm and Travis seeming outgoing. However, they explicitly will not hesitate to kill anyone who gets in their way.
• Badass Bystander:
  • Robert, the elderly Texan might be half-asleep Grumpy Old Man, but when Beau decides to drop the charade and openly takes Charlotte hostage, he sneaks for his gun and casually aims at the robbers, telling Charlotte to go for it when she's preparing to break free. He's the one who fatally wounded Beau, too.
  • Seeing this as an opportunity, Pete draws his gun, too, when the robbers turn their full attention to Robert, creating a Mexican Standoff.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Beau & Travis are the travelling bank robbers who are holding up the diner.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Miles and Sybil dream about being an Outlaw Couple. Unfortunately for everyone - including themselves - they get an opportunity to try that out in practice, while their "wanna-be" status doesn't make them any less dangerous.
• Black Comedy: The more the salesman tries to get away with the money from the robbery, the more obstacles there are on the way, in an increasingly frustrating, bloody, but also hilarious way.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Beau makes it explicitly clear to Charlotte & the knife salesman that the only reason he hasn't slit their throats and stolen their cars is because he figures the cars don't have gas either.
• Card-Carrying Villain: When Beau makes Charlotte admit that she knows that he and Travis are the men that robbed the bank in Buckeye, Beau smugly replies "Bingo" before strangling her to near-death.
• The Cavalry Arrives Late:
  • Vernon enters the diner with a shotgun a few seconds too late, being only able to clip Travis.
  • The sheriff and his deputy come to the place just as the salesman left.
• Chekhov's Gun: More like Chekhov's knife. The Japanese knife that the salesman pitches to Charlotte ends up being used to help him escape the diner shootout unharmed.
• Chekhov's News: The radio news informs about the bank robbery, the number of robbers and their gateway car in the first minute of the film.
• Contrived Coincidence: The salesman runs out of gas just around the area where the gas truck crashed.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • The viewers know from the get-go that the fuel truck will never arrive, as it had an accident and the opening credits play to the shots of the wreckage. The characters keep waiting for the truck to show up.
  • The salesman is innocent of both the robbery and the massacre in the diner, but because he's the Sole Survivor, everyone assumes he did it.
• The Ditz: Sybil, the airhead girlfriend of Miles. She is constantly spaced out, easily distracted and seems more concerned with her nails than the situation around her. This also makes her dangerous eventually, since she's too dumb to think things through.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: By the end of the movie, everyone in the film who went to the diner at any point (besides the Deputy) is dead.
• Everyone Is Armed: Lampshaded by Travis. As nearly everyone in the diner also pulls out a gun to oppose the two bank robbers, Travis shouts "Jesus Christ! Does everybody have a f-cking gun?"
• Extremely Short Timespan: It takes place between 6 AM till afternoon of a single day.
• Faux Affably Evil: Throughout the film, Beau and Travis put on a facade of being outgoing and friendly customers. However, they show their true colours by the end of the second act when they threaten everyone in the diner.
• Greasy Spoon: It's a low-brow diner by a road stop, where AC is constantly broken, the single waitress is also the owner and part-time cook and the supposed trademark pie is so-so.
• Greed: There is a duffel bag full of bank robbery loot. And the opportunity arises for a whole lot of people to lay their hands on it. It gets them all killed.
• Hated by All: Miles. He's dumb enough to first side with the robbers, then instantly antagonise them which makes him a target for both sides of the Mexican Standoff. On top of that, he's shown almost constantly arguing and squabbling with Sybil, so their relationship isn't great, either.
• Hidden Weapons: When Beau & Travis attempt to make their exit, nearly all of the customers pull out hidden pistols, while Charlotte reaches for a hidden kitchen knife.
• Internal Reveal:
  • The opening titles play to the sight of the overturned fuel truck. The salesman only finds it in the final sequence of the film.
  • Right from when it is damaged, the audiences can clearly see the gas leak from the salesman's car. He only finds out when the engine starts sputtering much later, previously ignoring the fuel gauge due to the tank being almost empty anyway.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: The salesman is a very morally ambiguous character, who first kills in self-defence, then by accident, then again in self-defence... and then he abandons an infant without any care in the middle of nowhere in Yuma County. Notably, the jump happens within minutes in-universe.
• Killing in Self-Defense: Part of the Sympathetic P.O.V. the salesman gets is due to this trope - he only killed Sybil, because she was about to shoot him in cold blood.
• Lack of Empathy: While Beau is definitely ruthless in his own right, Travis does not seem to care at all when Beau is choking Charlotte to near-death. Later, when the shootout happens, Travis is indifferent to all the people he and Beau have killed and is amused by the fact that he is unscathed, barely checking up on the wounded Beau.
• Leave No Witnesses: Discussed extensively by Miles, and then attempted by the salesman - which only means an ever-growing pile of bodies.
• Mexican Standoff: A three-way one happens in the end of act two: when Beau openly takes Charlotte hostage, Robert and Pete draw their guns to stop him and Travis from leaving the diner with Charlotte or harming her. Then Miles draws his gun, and takes Pete at gunpoint, since he's stupid enough to try to get the loot for himself. Eventually, the situation devolves into an all-round shoot-out.
• Motivated by Fear:
  • Beau scares Charlotte and the salesman to the point where they just do what he orders them to.
  • Failing to simply plead or bribe the couple in the end, the salesman goes with their assumption that he's a dangerous criminal and stops negotiating. It fails when his gun jams and they make yet another dumb assumption that he's out of ammo.
• Near-Villain Victory: The salesman manages to get rid of the sheriff in a fiery explosion, leaving behind a trail of bodies and ultimately no witnesses, while carrying the bag full of money... but is shot by said sheriff and dies mere seconds later. Cue the credits.
• No Name Given: The salesman has no name, and people just address him directly or with Hey, You!.
• Not What It Looks Like: The salesman is taken for a violent bank robber by the couple and then, eventually, has to plea with the sheriff that he really is innocent - at least for the diner massacre and the bank robbery, that is.
• The Oner: The film extensively uses long, continuous, tracking shots and scenes. The longest is with the salesman stealing the loot, following him for the most of the process, going on for almost four minutes - and followed by another one, as he's siphoning the gas. There is also the scene where Beau is telling Charlotte and the salesman what to do and how to behave, which is all in one, long take.
• Outlaw Couple: Well, Sybil and Miles want to be one, and "luckily" for them, an opportunity arrives.
• Police Are Useless: Big time. The deputy is a dimwit that has to write everything down and acts as if playing bandits and robbers rather than being on duty, while the sheriff is consistently portrayed as not taking his job seriously and just killing time during office hours with modelling, smoking pipe and gossip.
• Reliably Unreliable Guns: Inverted, with disastrous consequences. The snubnose revolver hits an empty chamber when the salesman is trying to scare the couple with a "Shut Up!" Gunshot. The husband wrongly assumes that the gun is empty.
• Shout-Out:
  • The first act of the film might as well be an extended diner sequence from A History of Violence, with two robbers taking hostage the patrons. They even look, act, behave and are dressed similarly and have similar dynamics - right down to an instance of Suddenly Shouting when the older of the robbers is making a point.
  • This being a very Tarantino-esque movie, there are references to Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds,The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
  • The "a lot of sugar in the coffee" scheme is taken directly from Sudden Impact, including even recreating the framing of the shots.
• The Sociopath: Beau & Travis. Between Beau's cold and calculating nature and Travis' outright savage and selfish instincts, the two are both ruthless and have no qualms about hurting anyone who gets in their way, even an elderly couple.
• Sole Survivor: The salesman is the only person that makes it out alive from the diner shoot-out.
• Stealing from Thieves: What Miles and Sybil try to pull when they notice the green Pinto matching the newscast description. It only escalates from there, with first Sybil and then the salesman trying to make the run with the money, leaving no witnesses behind.
• Stupid Evil: Miles. His first instinct when spotting a car from a bank robbery is to try to jack its trunk. Then he proceeds with siding with the robbers, except without asking if they plan to share their loot. Eventually, he ends up being a party all for himself, which means everyone is shooting in his direction when the Mexican Standoff turns violent.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: The couple that arrives at the stop after the massacre takes the salesman for both the murderer and the one who robbed the bank. Eventually, just to force them to cooperate, he agrees with their wrong assumptions to scare them into submission.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: How the Shoot the Hostage Taker plays out - which is why it's so rarely done in real life. When the gunfight starts, Charlotte, who was taken hostage by Beau, is gunned down almost instantly by the robber, since he already had his gun primed at her and she's mere two steps away. He would have to actively search for a new target to not shoot her.
• Traveling Salesman: Of cheap, Japanese kitchen knives. As he points out, the business is going terrible and he's too stressed out by the presence of the robbers to make a selling pitch when Charlotte asks him for a presentation.
• Villain Ball: While the robbers mostly avoid grabbing on to this, Travis does have a moment where he pettily tells Miles, who also has a gun, that he's not giving any money to him, which he immediately takes back once Miles turns on him.
• "The Villain Knows" Moment: While Charlotte & the knife salesman try to keep the fact that they know that Beau & Travis are the bank robbers, Beau immediately finds out that not only do they know, but that Charlotte will try to get help from outside.
• The Villain Knows Where You Live: Invoked by the salesman as he tries to settle the situation with the couple without having to kill them in cold blood. Instead, he asks for their IDs, reminding them that he will know where to find them.
• Wild Card: Miles and Sybil, a wanna-be Outlaw Couple, figure out the situation but are mostly interested in the loot from the bank robbery and nothing else. They are the main reason why the Mexican Standoff turns into such a monumental mess.