Review #16 LAST ACTION HERO (1993, John McTiernan)

 

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A teenager magically enters the fictional world of his favourite action star and they team up to thwart a villain who makes the reverse journey to wreak havoc in the real world.

Starring  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austin O’Brien, Charles Dance, F Murray Abraham, Tom Noonan, Anthony Quinn

Written by  Shane Black, David Arnott

Produced by  John McTiernan, Steve Roth

Duration  131 minutes

Forty-two months. That was the gap between the release of LAST ACTION HERO in June 1993 and SCREAM coming out in December 1996.

HERO made a disappointing $137 million from an $85 million budget, bringing home a decidedly non-blockbuster profit of just $52 million. SCREAM, meanwhile, earned $158 million – nearly 12 times its production costs.

And sandwiched between the two was WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE. It didn’t make a big profit, only just doubling its budget, but nevertheless this third film is crucial to understanding why a tonal-mashup that both parodies and delivers on the genre tropes it dissects could be a flop, whilst three years later the same kind of project is a monster hit.

Audiences in 1993 weren’t ready for LAST ACTION HERO. They needed a smaller film to act as an aperitif to get them used to the idea of a genre takedown, before they were ready to embrace the whole meta thing in a summer tentpole movie. Fast-forward to today, and fourth-wall breaking with snarky self-commentary has practically become a genre onto itself.

So I don’t see HERO’s disappointing box office as a reflection of the film’s quality; its failure to connect with viewers was just a matter of timing. And coming up against a little film called JURRASSIC PARK didn’t help, either. 

But there was also the Schwarzenegger factor.

Everyone has to fail eventually and it was just Arnie’s time. In the 11 years since CONAN THE BARBARIAN, he’d had a pretty much unbroken run of hits, peaking with TERMINATOR 2, 1991’s highest earner. He’d become too big to fail – which meant that many were waiting for him to do exactly that. Factor in a marketing campaign that was confident to the point of arrogance, with Columbia Pictures deciding that HERO was too big to stay on terra firma, and knives were being sharpened. When the reviews came they were scathing and audiences stayed away.

Personally, I’ve never been able to relate to the negativity surrounding LAST ACTION HERO. It might help that I was only 10 when it was released, so too young to see it on the big screen (I did, of course, see JURASSIC PARK) and only consuming it later on VHS, when the heat was off and Arnie had gone back to basics with TRUE LIES – although his career would never really recover from the fateful summer of 1993. 

My reaction on rewatching LAST ACTION HERO this time, 30 years after all the fuss, is that it’s a pretty entertaining way to spend two hours. All it really wants to be is a fun and funny coming-of-age wish-fulfilment fantasy for 13-year-old boys. And it succeeds! Maybe the mistake was casting in Schwarzenegger someone known for R-rated mayhem, unwittingly acknowledging a truth middle-America would rather ignore: that kids lap that stuff up several years before they’re legally supposed to. If made today, the boy would have to be into something boringly age-appropriate, like Harry Potter or the Marvel content empire.

I don’t feel the need to defend HERO any further, so I’ll instead leave you with some stray observations:

– Arnie's first line of a movie primarily set in California is the prophetic, "When the governor gets here, call me."

– During the opening, Tom Noonan's dastardly Ripper calls Schwarzenegger ‘sport’, which I like to think is a reference to William Petersen's poster-worthy line, "It's just you and me now, sport", from his pursuit of Noonan’s Francis Dolarhyde in MANHUNTER.

– Is Arnie driving on the LA viaducts supposed to be a reference to TERMINATOR 2 or another Petersen movie, TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA? Or maybe to GREASE?

– I think that Stallone would actually have been great in TERMINATOR 2; his hangdog expression and stoic sensitivity are the perfect fit for a cyborg learning to appreciate humanity. Not so sure Arnie could have pulled off underdog Rocky Balboa, though. Come to think of it, surely naming HERO’s fictional film franchise JACK SLATER-plus-Roman-numeral is a reference to Stallone’s boxing series?

– When Jack and Danny enter our world, they’re in New York City, and they visit the Empire State Building – as you do. But in the actual landmark in real life, the material for tourists neglects to mention LAST ACTION HERO in its list of movies that filmed there. Which you most definitely do not do!

– It’s known for its star cameos (Jim Belushi, Tina Turner, Chevy Chase, Van Damme, Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell, Robert Patrick as the T-1000, Danny DeVito as a cartoon cat), but HERO is also a rollcall of noted stunt-performer-actors. How many movies feature Al Leong (DIE HARD, LETHAL WEAPON, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA), Henri Kingi (SCARFACE, ROAD HOUSE, PREDATOR 2) and Sven-Ole Thorsen (THE RUNNING MAN, HARD TARGET, ON DEADLY GROUND)?

– Director John McTiernan manages to cram in tributes to two of his other action classics within the space of a minute: PREDATOR when an elaborate laser sight from a helicopter targets Arnie, and then DIE HARD when the action hero falls down a building in slo-mo. Bravo McT, bravo! 

Four stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  I mean, debatably yes. Has anyone been able to properly take on Arnie’s mantle? Vin Diesel? Dwayne Johnson? Jason Statham? ... Daniel Stisen? You can argue among yourselves.

What would a movie called FIRST ACTION HERO be about?  They already did this with the Hamlet take-off. Other than that, I dunno … Errol Flynn?

Additional:  Was Arnie-as-Hamlet chosen simply due to its status as the Shakespeare play and therefore the play overall – or was it because Hamlet itself has a bit of the old fourth-wall-breaking meta stuff going on, what with its ironically used play-within-a-play business?

Previously:  THE LAST KEEPERS

Next time:  THE LAST EXPERIMENT  

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