Get people to name Ridley Scott’s best movie and you’ll hear “Gladiator,” “Alien” or “Blade Runner,” but one of his finest in recent years is a film almost nobody saw in theaters. That movie is “The Last Duel,” a brutal, brilliant medieval drama from 2021 that flopped hard on release, but is getting its second wind on streaming thanks to platforms like Tubi.
Directed by Scott and based on Eric Jager’s book, “The Last Duel” dramatizes the true story of the last legally sanctioned duel to the death in medieval France. It tells the same events three times, “Rashomon”-style, from three different points of view, with the final version belonging to the woman at the center of it all. It pulled in just $30 million at the box office against a $100 million budget, but critics admired it, and in the years since it’s come to be regarded as one of Scott’s best films.
Now that it’s streaming free on Tubi, there’s no excuse not to give one of the most underrated movies of the decade the attention it always deserved.
What is ‘The Last Duel’ about?
J ean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) are close friends in 14th-century France, two men who once fought side by side in battle. But they couldn’t be more different. Carrouges is a proud, hot-tempered knight who feels the world owes him more than it’s given him, while Le Gris is charming, educated and quick to rise in the favor of their powerful lord, Count Pierre d’Alençon (Ben Affleck).
As Le Gris climbs and Carrouges keeps getting passed over for lands and titles he believes are rightfully his, their friendship devolves into a rivalry. Things escalate further when Carrouges marries Marguerite (Jodie Comer), a strong-willed noblewoman. While Carrouges is away, Le Gris forces his way into their home and assaults her.
When her husband returns, Marguerite does something extraordinarily dangerous for a woman of her time: She refuses to stay silent, naming Le Gris as her attacker. Enraged and determined to defend his wife’s honor, Carrouges petitions the king for a trial by combat, a duel to the death in which God is said to grant victory to whoever is telling the truth.
“The Last Duel” is an interesting mix of both rage and spectacle. I went in expecting a straightforward medieval epic, so I was surprised to realize it had a lot to say about truth and power dynamics — and, of course, believing women at its heart.
As a “Rashomon” fan, the movie’s three-perspective structure is what actually elevates it. Watching the exact same events replay from Jean’s self-serving point of view, then Jacques’s, then Marguerite’s, you start to notice how casually these men rewrite their own histories, and how differently a woman experiences the same moments the men barely register.
Matt Damon and Adam Driver are both excellent as the two rivals, Ben Affleck is a surprising addition I didn’t see coming, and Jodie Comer is fantastic as Marguerite. And in the end, the final duel is one of the most viscerally intense sequences Scott has ever put to film.
If you’re wondering about how it might leave you mentally when the credits roll, you can just sit with it at home to reckon with those feelings. Whatever the case, you should absolutely give it a watch, as you’ll want to make sure you catch it while it’s streaming free.
