Last Action Hero (1993)

You have to admit that no other heavily-accented and heavily-muscled foreigner took over our shores by storm quite like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For years, he was a world class, award-winning bodybuilder and soon parlayed himself into TV parts (did you know Arnold was in an episode of "The Streets of San Francisco"? Neither did I...) and got parts in movies as diverse as Stay Hungry, Hercules in New York, Pumping Iron (natch), The Villain and Scavenger Hunt. Then he had the good fortune to be cast in Jim Cameron's low-budget/high-yield opus The Terminator and there was nowhere for him to go but up.

From that point, Schwarzenegger became a household name (as they say) and found himself as easily cast in action roles (Commando, Predator, The Running Man, the Conan movies) as well as in comedies (Twins). By the time the early Nineties rolled around, Arnold Schwarzenegger movies were top earners, Arnie himself was a recognized box office draw and studios realized the power that muscle-bound Austrians had in the film world.

But something else happened around this time as well; seems that despite all the wealth and power he wielded in HollywoodLand, Ah-nuld felt that maybe - just maybe - his was a personae that lent itself to parody.

Parody. This huge, hulking man with the long name and funny accent thought he could be the object of more humor. He already was a favorite target of comedians and impersonators the world over and his larger-than-life visage and career was something of a laugh-inducer to begin with. But hey: are you going to argue with someone who can bench press oak trees? Me neither.

And Columbia Pictures didn't argue either, not when our Austrian came came before them as the subject of a movie that meant to lampoon all action heroes past, not to mention big-budget extravaganzas, over-produced cop-buddy movies and the fakeness of Hollywood in general.

Kind of a touchy area here, especially starring Mister Action Poster Child who fell right into this world effortlessly...but let's get to the matter at hand.

Last Action Hero, directed as it was by no less a maestro of mayhem than Die Hard's own John McTiernan, promised a slam-bang, blow-em-up, shoot-em-up, mow-em-down action flick with all your daily requirements of bullets, dynamite, car chases, action catchphrases and super-mega-ultra heroics - and a side order of sarcasm. AND starring The Governator??? How could it possibly not be the biggest hit of the year, the decade, the century and all recorded time?!

One thing at a time, dear reader.

Shall we have some plot? This is, actually, the story of a young boy named Danny Madigan (Austin O'Brien, in only his second film - his first was The Lawnmower Man) who is a huge huge HUGE fan of Jack Slater (You-Know-Who) - a larger-than-life action hero. When Danny's best friend, a theater projectionist (Robert Prosky), gives him a magic ticket to the newest Jack Slater film, Danny's transported into Slater's world, where the good guys always win and the bad guys always fail. It's the best possible place to be for Danny, but things take a turn for the worst when one of Slater's enemies, a hitman named Benedict (Charles Dance), tries to not only knock off Slater but Danny as well. Then Benedict gets hold of Danny's ticket and Danny and Slater find themselves in trouble - not only in Slater's world but in Danny's as well....

This is a pared-down description, I'll grant you, but believe me: the script itself ticks off every possible convention of film-making in the best Lethal Weapon-style. And no wonder, writers Zak Penn and Adam Leff based this script on just about every possible incarnation of a formula that was popular even before 1987. Even after that, the screenplay was later punched up by no less than Shane Black - whose Lethal Weapon was an obvious lead-in for this - and David Arnott, whose only other writing credit was that action masterpiece...The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.

Yes, the Andrew "Dice" Clay thing.

I know, I know. Moving on....

Let me say this much about the acting: Schwarzenegger playing an action hero is pretty much the easiest thing in the world, seeing as he just says goofy one-liners, shoots at everything, threatens, drives his car fast, listens to hard rock and takes every attempt on his life in stride and moves along at breakneck speed. He, at least, plays it like we expect.

O'Brien's Danny is your standard-issue mop-headed Nineties kid who's cynical to a fault with his world and with what he watches in movies. It's not like the role demands anything extra except keeping up with the accompanying explosions and the lead character, but at least O'Brien is plausible enough, even when trying to ruin things for everybody. But I'll get to that in a bit.

Charles Dance makes such an impression in what could be called the "Alan Rickman role" that it's easy to forget he's been even better in such films as Plenty, White Mischief, Pascali's Island and Gosford Park. Of course, his casting here suggests your typical action film conceit that every villain has to be lean, accented, effete and soft-spoken. Even John Lithgow had to fall into that mindset when cast in a film like Cliffhanger, but that's another review for another time....

The rest of the cast is literally jam-packed with cameos and ultra-quick walk-ons from the likes of Art Carney, Anthony Quinn, Ian McKellen, Joan Plowright, Tina Turner and "more stars than there are in the heavens", to quote a film studio or two. Also included is Sven Ole-Thorson, a veteran actor who's been cast as a heavy not only in many of Arnold's past flicks but in so many other action flicks that it's just a given that you'd see him herein. And I think I even caught a glimpse of Al Leong, too. You know: the Asian fella with the long moustache and long hair who's been in just as many - if not more action flicks - as Ole-Thorson. You'd know him if you saw him.

Like I said, Last Action Hero touches on all the points of interest. Mismatched pair forced to work together, bulletproof good guy with perfect aim. bad guys who can't hit the broad side of a barn and continuously get killed off, multiple explosions, a constantly bellowing police chief (Frank MacRae, seemingly born for such a role), vile bad guys (Dance and Tom Noonan, playing a menacing killer with an axe), suspicious pals (F. Murray Abraham as an shifty FBI agent), gravity-defying stunts, hanging-by-your-fingers-over-plummeting-drops moments, unimportant sidekicks, gunfire raining down like fireworks and so many more that you'll forget you ever knew from every cop movie you've ever seen from Freebie and The Bean on.

And there are a few of these observations that either ring true or bring a smile to the knowing. The phone numbers all have 555 prefixes. The cops are partnered with black and white images of Humphrey Bogart or rabbis. There are your occasional animated cat detectives voiced by Danny DeVito. Cars can drive up on the sides of buildings. Killer dogs stand in pyramid formations. Well, maybe not all of these cop movie conventions make sense, but you get the idea.

The thing is, Danny is more than willing to bring all of these observations to light once in Slater's world, working in vain to convince his idol that this wonderland of cliches and nonsense is not real.

Okay, first of all, WHY? What possible reason could this kid have for wanting to shatter the illusion around him by convincing everyone else that none of their reality is, in fact, real? This is worse than if that annoying guy in the back of the theater talking crap about the movie you're trying to watch is suddenly on-screen, ruining it for everybody. You just want to tell the kid to shut up and enjoy the ride instead of trying to point out the matte lines, guide wires, fake phone numbers and the fact that tar doesn't readily wipe off of people's skin.

Something else that really doesn't work for me is the conceit in the later part of the movie where Danny drags Slater's character back with him into the real world, where none of Slater's reality comes through and all that's left is reality's harsh truths of physics, gravity, callous humanity and the realization that not every car explodes when you shoot at it.

I'm well aware that this is part of the script and the flip side of the coin that Last Action Hero is trying to exploit - that life is NOT a movie and it has nasty realities on this side of the movie screen which no one really wants to deal with, hence our immersion in such silliness as the latest Jack Slater movie.

But what of it, then; does that mean that if we only like the silliness and fakeness of Schwarzenegger's character, then the reality that Danny escapes through movies is just a microcosm of our own lives we're trying to get away from by watching Commando or Predator or whatever?

It's a dramatic crutch, I suppose, that Slater is confronted by a world where he is not indestructible, all-knowing and has perfect aim. However unexpected such a turn of events is, it's not really in this film's best interest that everything which was built up in the first half is trashed in the last half, simply by switching the fish-out-of-water characters from Danny to Slater.

Even though Dance's assassin finds reality the perfect world for himself (especially in a funny scene where he tests his theories about shooting someone in real life versus his usual setting), it also sets up a scene where Slater confronts no less than Arnold Scwarzenegger, complaining about how the "real world" Arnie has made his life miserable. Not much is made of this scene (how fun it would have been to have seen Schwarzenegger team up with himself to hunt down all the bad guys), and that's another problem with this film....

Not enough is made of the conceit of "film world" colliding with "real world" where some really striking observations could have been made. Like Slater's character could have tried to storm into a "real world" police station demanding cooperation to hunt down the bad guys...Slater could have kept his "film world" abilities in the "real world" and really made for some bewildering moments of stopping bad guys...we could have been treated to a scene where Slater demolishes "real world" cars during chases where such vehicles would not have been able to make it though repeated takes...the list goes on and on, depending on how many other conceits you no doubt have seen that would have been fun to watch applied to reality.

Another problem is we're watching something akin to an action version of 1981's Pennies From Heaven. Reality and fantasy are so disparate and far removed from one another and so impossible to mesh into one that it's like watching two different movies that don't really go together. One is admittedly more enjoyable than the other, because the other is so close to the bone that it isn't really entertainment.

Which brings me to the reality of Last Action Hero: it bombed. This $80 million-plus endeavor earned only some $50 million domestically and, even though it got an additional $87 million overseas, it still fell far short of what was expected for an Arnold Schwarzenegger film. After all, the reality is that you expect any film in which our Last Austrian Hero stars to easily make back double, if not triple, its budget. That Last Action Hero sputtered so badly is not necessarily a reflection on Schwarzenegger but on the idea that he would lend himself so readily to a film that had maybe one or two good ideas (outlandish action film, playing with the conventions of the genre) and then imploded on itself with the idea of knocking down its own sand castle.

I guess a lot of people expected this to be THE movie of 1993, forget the fact that some stupid dinosaur movie got better press. In the end when all was said and done, a cute idea that would have made a good skit on "Mad TV" or some such got stretched to 130 minutes and made the cardinal mistake of thinking that fans of the genre wanted to see the deconstruction of their favorite subject.

This, of course, did nothing to slow down the momentum of Schwarzenegger, who went on to star in True Lies, Eraser, End of Days, Collateral Damage and other films which just went to prove that anyone who went to see one of his movies had a set of expectations to meet.

...and not a one of those expectations involved pointing out the matte lines.