Movie Review: ‘The Last Showgirl’ Launches New Chapters for Pamela Anderson and Gia Coppola

Going into The Last Showgirl, there were two questions at the forefront of my mind: Can Pamela Anderson really have a career renaissance in 2025? And can a single family really achieve a three-generation directing dynasty? This movie was so good that it answered both questions with an enthusiastic “Yes!”

Shelly Gardner (Anderson) is an older woman in a French-style review at a casino on the Las Vegas Strip called Le Razzle Dazzle. Shelly started in this show in the ‘80s when such reviews were at the height of their popularity, but now Le Razzle Dazzle has become the last of its kind. Shelly finds herself as the mother figure to the younger girls in the show, Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka), and she remains close friends with her former co-star Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) who aged out of the show and took up a job as a cocktail waitress to stay in Vegas and keep up her gambling addiction.

Shelly has given up everything in her life to live out her dream of being a Las Vegas showgirl, so much so that she pretty much sacrificed her relationship with her real daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd) who was ultimately adopted by her friend’s parents because of Shelly’s negligence. But when the show’s producer Eddie (Dave Bautista) informs the cast that the show is coming to a close, Shelly is left to face the end of her dream and contemplate the next chapter of her life.

Pamela Anderson was such a highly sexualized actress during the height of her career in the 90s, to the point where I think she was unfairly judged solely on her sexuality and not on her talent as an actress. It probably didn’t help that her first major role, Casey Jean “C.J.” Parker, was on such a sexualized show, namely Baywatch. I think that there was a tendency to not take her seriously back then. In some ways that’s mirrored in the character of Shelly, but Shelly finds herself at the end of her one role in a Las Vegas show in her 50s and realizes that she has no other marketable talents, and that even the work she’s done at Le Razzle Dazzle hasn’t made her a good enough dancer for other shows. In that sense, the similarities between Pamela Anderson and Shelly Gardner end, because Pamela Anderson proves in this movie that she’s still got a lot to offer at this stage in her life.

Then, of course, the other fascinating storyline behind this film is that The Last Showgirl is directed by Gia Coppola who, if she really comes to take off as a director, threatens to make the Coppola family the biggest family directing dynasty of all time. Gia Coppola is, of course, the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola, most famous for being the director of The Godfather trilogy, and the niece of Sophia Coppola, known for directing movies like The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and most recently Priscilla.

And, while The Last Showgirl is not the first outing for Gia Coppola, her first two feature films, Palo Alto and Mainstream, didn’t really take off. Palo Alto was viewed as a promising debut for the new director, but now, in hindsight, the fact that it was based on a book by James Franco kind of taints it. And the reviews for Mainstream were aggressively mixed. But then, every great director has a few flubs here and there, and even Francis Ford Coppola has put out a few absolute flops, most recently 2024’s Megalopolis. But The Last Showgirl is the film where Gia proves herself as a director in her own right, because this film is an outstandingly engaging story told in a really compelling way.

Based on the plot of the film, I was ready to strap in and just sit through a depressing film about an older person realizing that life has passed them by, a passive story of sadness and depression. I was pleasantly surprised that The Last Showgirl was not that at all. I mean, yes, it is the story of life having passed you by, but there is also a much bigger moral ambiguity in Shelly’s character. The fact that she dedicated her life to this hollow dream to the detriment of her relationship with her daughter really leaves you wondering if Shelly is a good person. What further complicates that is that Shelly seems to only be a mother figure to the girls in her show when she feels like it. There’s this heartbreaking scene where Jodie, who ran away from home to dance in Vegas, comes to realize that her real mother will never forgive her and turns to Shelly for emotional support, and Shelly’s refusal to help her because it’s simply a “bad time” is absolutely heartbreaking.

It’s hard, after some of the things that Shelly does, to still feel sorry for her. But that’s part of the brilliance of Anderson’s performance: that she can make a character feel sympathetic in spite of deeply unlikeable moments. There’s such a nuance to this character that you both feel critical of her and, at the same time, you can see how and why she fell for this romantic dream of the glitz and glamor of Las Vegas.

This film is full of excellent performances all around, by the way. Jamie Lee Curtis’ performance as Annette is really outstanding, and she serves as both a deeply sad character in her own right as well as the embodiment of Shelly’s biggest fear of what the future holds for her after Le Razzle Dazzle. Kiernan Shipka, who is frankly wonderful in everything she does, puts in a compelling performance in a fairly small role, and that moment of Shelly letting her down is the most heartbreaking in the whole film, largely due to Shipka selling that moment completely. Dave Bautista, who has shown us how capable he is of playing larger-than-life characters, actually puts in a surprisingly understated and subtle performance in this film, which is exactly what the role of Eddie needed.

But, ultimately, it was Gia Coppola’s direction that gave the film the perfect tone to bring across this delicate and nuanced story. The Last Showgirl isn’t the easiest story to tell to begin with, and it’s the work of the talented cast and crew that allows it to hit all the right emotional notes. The hope is that this is only the beginning of that career renaissance for Anderson, and that it’s also only the beginning of Gia Coppola’s successful directing career. Judging by how strong of an offering The Last Showgirl is, it seems likely that this isn’t the last we’ll hear from either of them.

The Last Showgirl just opened nationwide last weekend. Find where it’s playing near you here.

Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions