Arnold Schwarzenegger has about 50 movie credits to his name. He’s done everything from playing the leading man (as in Total Recall or Conan the Barbarian) to the villain (as in The Terminator and Batman & Robin). He’s had surprising effective small roles (as in The Expendables 2 or Around the World in 80 Days) and even nice cameos (as in Dave or Dr. Dolittle 2). But there’s one movie that has loomed like a dark cloud, rather, unfairly, over his head his whole career.
No, it’s not Hercules in New York or even the aforementioned Batman & Robin. Even the last two Terminator movies have been better received than Last Action Hero, which opened on this date, June 18, 1993. On the surface, it should’ve been a megahit. Schwarzenegger was reteaming with his Predator director John McTiernan with his Predator co-star Shane Black writing the script. You had the man who showed us Bruce Willis can be an action star along with the man who rewrote the format for the buddy-cop action genre. It should’ve worked.
But it didn’t.
For the most part, it wasn’t a wise decision to open the movie one week (seven measley days) after a juggernaut like Jurassic Park opened. Even though Park was originally scheduled to open in July before it was moved to June 11, 1993. So, Columbia Pictures foolishly kept the June 18 date. Schwarzenegger, himself, as an executive producer, tried to get the studio to push the release date by four weeks. I agree. It should’ve been released over the July 4 holiday weekend. It would have given audiences a few weeks to see Park so they’d want something new.
But it may have more to do with the movie itself rather than when it was released. Before the movie was even in theaters, that had been concerns over the movie with reports that reshoots were being made well into May of 1993. Test audiences didn’t care for a preview and Columbia, under the order of parent company Sony, tore up the test cards leading to much bad word of mouth. Even though Black and David Arnott are credited as screenwriters, Carrie Fisher and William Goldman were also hired as script doctors. Larry Ferguson, who has also worked with McTiernan on The Hunt for Red October, had also worked on the script.
Zak Penn, who would go on to be a big-time screenwriter with movies like X-Men: The Last Stand, The Avengers and The Incredible Hulk, said the script he had written with college friend, Adam Leff, was intended to be a parody of movies Black wrote. And the Black himself would be critical of the movie saying, “It was a mess. There was a movie in there, struggling to emerge, which would have pleased me. But what they’d made was a jarring, random collection of scenes.”
While Schwarzenegger gets top billing, he isn’t the main character. And that’s the problem. The focus of the story is on a young kid, Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien), a tween who’s at the pivotal age where he’s not fulling discovered girls, but still romanticizes celebrities. Like a lot of children born and raised in the 1980s, he’s a huge Schwarzenegger fan who loves his fictional film franchise Jack Slater. The movies present Schwarzenegger in self-parody as an LAPD detective who plays by his own rules but lead to a lot of destruction. He wears the signature blue jeans, alligator skinned boots, red shirt and worn brown-leather jacket. Slater uses Desert Eagle handguns with an unlimited amount of ammunition, which is a firearms in-joke because their magazines don’t hold many bullets.
Danny lives a dull life in New York City. His father is dead and his mother, Irene (Mercedes Ruehl), is loving and caring, but her work schedule has turned Danny into a latchkey kid. He’s often ditching school to go see movies at a rundown theater where the aging projectionist, Nick (Robert Prosky), seems to be his own friend. Nick tells Danny that he’s checking the print of the fourth Jack Slater movie that’s due to premiere that weekend and offers to allow Danny to come seea the movie at midnight.
But Irene doesn’t want Danny hanging around Nick nor the theater which is in a bad neighborhood. However, Danny goes anyway despite nearly being robbed during a home invasion. He discovers the NYPD don’t care much for them as the detective he talks to can barely look up from the papers he’s reading to say that Irene couldn’t get off work and wants him to go directly home.
Yet, Danny goes to the theater anyway. Nick, as a token of their friendship, presents him with an old-fashioned ticket he got from Harry Houdini when he was a child. In the theater, Danny becomes excited as the movie opens on mob boss Tony Vivaldi (Anthony Quinn) torturing Frank Slater (Art Carney), Slater’s favorite second cousin. The joke is that action movies run out of ideas after a while that the bad guys kill Slater’s relative does play on the notion most action movies are generated by the hero’s need for revenge usually over the killing of an ancillary character who appears in a handful of scenes.
But during an action sequence, after Frank’s house explodes with him in it, killing two uniformed officers (one an older black man a few days short of retirement), dynamite thrown by goons burst through the screen into the theater. Danny runs away toward the screen and finds himself not only in the movie but the backseat of Slater’s convertible, surprising both of them.
At first Danny seems to be excited to be in the movie. What fan wouldn’t like finding themselves in a movie like Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings? Unfortunately, it ruins this opportunity as soon as it arises. Danny almost immediately tries to tell Slater that this is all a movie they’re in. Naturally, Slater doesn’t believe it because all he knows is his own world.
There could’ve been a great story about Schwarzenegger parodying his action hero roles along with a young fan who takes full advantage of the moment. The police station where Slater works is way too glamourous with a desk sergeant assigning officers who are total opposites. One of those is Whiskers (voiced by Danny DeVito), an animated chauvinistic cat in a trenchcoat and sunglasses. Danny also spots Sharon Stone, parodying her role in Basic Instinct and Robert Patrick, appearing as a cop like in Terminator 2.
These cameos work and there’s this unrealistic notion that police stations are always very open and inviting, like the commons/food court area in a shopping mall. In fact, there are very small and claustrophobic with officers tripping over themselves and various rooms and locations that are secure and unable for the public to access. Slater’s supervisor is Lt. Dekker (Frank McRae), an ill-tempered man who’s always screaming. Sadly, McRae who played this same type of character in 48 Hrs., had already parodied this role in National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1 earlier that year and they knew how to use him sparingly. After an initial scene of him screaming loudly, Dekker becomes redundant.
Later in the movie where Slater gets mad at Dekker for his yelling, he winks at Danny. And that’s the problem. The movie is too busy winking and nudging at us. It works better when it’s just trying to show the absurdity of action movies, such as how goons with handguns always seem to just show up out of nowhere. There’s a great action sequence in which Slater tries to stop a corpse from releasing posionous gas that is both thrilling and ridiculously overdone.
It probably would’ve been better if someone at least attempted to write a plot outline for the fictional Jack Slater IV. Is what we’re seeing happening because of the plot or has Danny’s involvement changed it? There’s a scene where Slater drives down an alley and the scenery changes which Danny notices. Are there other movies that are co-existing in this world? The movie never does answer this question. Since Slater seems non-chalant about it, it might have made for a better movie within a movie.
Therefore, we never do see much of Jack Slater IV, just snippets. Eventually, Mr. Benedict (Charles Dance in a scene-stealing role) who is Vivaldi’s right-hand man becomes in possession of the magical ticket and realizes he can go into other worlds (and movies) too. This leads Danny and Slater to go into the real world where Slater realizes that shooting a gun at a car only results in bullet holes not explosions.
Slater is surprised and stunned to realize that he’s a fictional character like Danny has been telling him. But even the movie doesn’t do much with this because it could be too cerebral for an action movie. In the third Jack Slater movie, Slater’s son died from falling off a building as he was trying to stop The Ripper (Tom Noonan) a sadistic madman who carries an axe. This has caused Slater to develop post-traumatic stress disorder and his life outside of law enforcement is non-existent as he lives in a near barren apartment next to a major highway.
Noonan gives a good send-up of his roles as bad guys, most notably in Manhunter and even The Monster Squad. Later, at a movie premiere for Jack Slater IV, he appears as himself looking like a normal man in a tuxedo. It’s these little moments and others that make Last Action Hero worth watching as people mistake Slater for Schwarzenegger. Even M.C. Hammer, who’s star was fading by this time, manages to pull off a great laugh as he mistakes Slater for Schwarzenegger saying how he wants to do the whole soundtrack for the fifth Jack Slater movie.
Yet the movie still carries a cynical tone to it at times. When we do see Schwarzenegger playing himself at the star-studded premiere, he comes off as a jerk causing Maria Shriver to roll her eyes as he tries to plug Planet Hollywood during a red carpet interview. Considering what we know now about their marriage and the problems that arose in the 1990s with Schwarzenegger having an affair with the housekeeper Patty Baena resulting in the birth of their son, Joseph, the scene plays a little differently in hindsight.
To be honest, I’m not too big of a fan of celebrities playing fictional versions of themselves especially when they’re jerks. I think this might have been innovative for the first season of The Larry Sanders Show. However, it’s become a tired cliche and trope in the 30 years since. And by 1993, as we see here, it doesn’t really work. It’s obvious the movie was trying to go for the same feel The Player had a year earlier where about 65 celebrities appeared in cameos. Yet Robert Altman managed to make the flow of cameo appearances feel more in pace with the movie’s tone.
Ian McKellan has a nice appearance as Death emerging out of a theater screen where The Seventh Seal is shown. And there’s a subtle in-joke of Joan Plowright as Danny’s teacher, showing the 1948 Hamlet as it starred her husband, Laurence Olivier. But you barely see Chevy Chase and Damon Wayans walking together at a movie theater and having Leeza Gibbons and Chris Connelly interview Jim Belushi, Jean Claude Van Damme and Little Richard doesn’t add much except for us to see Belushi, Van Damme and Little Richard. It’s more of that winking.
Despite all this, the movie still has some great moments. I really didn’t care for O’Brien’s character or his acting. And neither did many others, which might explain why his career didn’t take off as well even though he has worked in movies and TV throughout the years. Ironically, Schwarzennegger’s follow-up to the movie would be a better attempt at parodying action movies when he collaborated with James Cameron on True Lies. The movie had a zesty, vibrant Reaganeighties comedic feel to it. And movies like Bad Boys in 1995 and especially Con Air in 1997 seemed to succeed in what Penn and Leff probably intended.
When Last Action Hero opened on 2,306 screens, it only grossed $14.2 million at the box office coming in second after Park. To add insult to injury, some theaters had to use tickets intended for it to sell to Park moviegoers because they ran of tickets for Park with clerks having to write on the Hero tickets. The box office dropped 47 percent for the second week as Sleepless in Seattle took the No. 2 spot and Hero only grossed about $50 million domestically and overall $137 million worldwide against a reported $85 million budget.
Schwarzenegger criticized the incoming of Bill Clinton as President which made no sense, but the Siege at Waco was still on everyone’s minds. It didn’t help matters that the World Trade Center had been bombed as well a few months earlier. In NYC, there was a giant inflatible Slater holding a stick of dynamite that had to be changed to a police badge. It had been a rough year for a lot of people as the country was trying to claw out of the recession left by the first Bush Administration.
Many movies, such as Super Mario Bros., Coneheads and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which had been highly anticipated ended up failing that summer. On the other hand, Cliffhanger, starring rival Sylvester Stallone (who comically appears in the fake world as The Terminator), had become a box office success too. Last Action Hero later found its success on the home video market. Some people blamed the marketing behind Columbia not informing audiences it was meant as a comedy, that the violence was meant as an exagerration at times. As he discussed in the Netflix series Arnold, it came around at the one time people his star was so high people were expecting him to fail.
I think in many ways, it made his career better. Schwarzenegger was able to take bigger risks and to quickly put it behind him by doing True Lies next. He said that he still gets residual checks so he knows the movie made money and Dance admitted it was a fun movie to do and would’ve fare better if it wasn’t competing with Jurassic Park.
In the end, Schwarzenegger proved, no matter what happens, he’ll always be back.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 