So who better to make an action movie about those action movies than the people who helped define them? People like John McTiernan (director of Die Hard, Predator, and The Hunt for Red October), Shane Black (screenwriter for Lethal Weapon 1&2 and Marathon alum The Monster Squad) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (star of every major action movie in the 80’s that didn’t star Sylvester Stallone)? I mean this was the 90s after all, the decade that was largely built on making fun of stuff from the 80s. It would be only three years later that we would see the release of Scream after all, the film that took the slasher horror film and reduced it to a series of tropes and stale cliches, it’s only natural that a similar coda would be attempted with the red-blooded two-fisted action movie. If only all genres could be this ironic.
The year is 1993, the place is the old school sleazy New York, and young Danny Madigan has one love in his life: Movies. Specifically action movies, and even more specifically the Jack Slater series, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular cigar-smoking, gun-shooty, detective slash one man army himself. Danny loves Jack Slater movies so much that he abandons school, disobeys his mother, allowing their fucking apartment to get robbed at knifepoint, all so that he can get to an early screening of Jack Slater IV. So it should be a dream come true when a golden ticket given to Art Carney by Harry Houdini transports him into the Los Angeles of Jack Slater IV, a world of plot contrivances, blatant product placement, and cartoon cats. Which it is, for a while, until professional goon Benedict steals the ticket. Worse yet, he manages to use it to escape into the real world, forcing Jack and Danny to go after him. Jack always managed to catch the crook in the movies, but what about in real life? What happens when the predictable villain suddenly becomes genre-savvy? It’s something you’ve got to see for yourself.
I came off as a bit cynical before, but truth be told I actually enjoyed Last Action Hero. Much in the same way that it took Wes Craven, a director who had a major influence in guiding the development of slasher movies, to properly deconstruct them in Scream, Last Action Hero takes the formula for action films and starts gleefully doodling in the margins. Sometimes it’s blatant, like Danny pointing out how every woman in town is ridiculously attractive or the perpetually angry black police chief who harangues the protagonists, and sometimes it’s more subtle, like how cars seem to have a natural tendency to flip, slide and careen into each other at the slightest provocation. It’s silly fun, and like other great satirical films, it works as the thing it’s satirizing. The huge, elaborate stunts, the catchy one-liners, the explosions, everything you might have seen in Die Hard and Lethal Weapon is in Last Action Hero, done with a careful eye by those who know action well, and dialed up to 11 to encompass the idea of action films. That’s really the main selling point of Last Action Hero, a gleeful exploration of outrageous action until the point of farce.
We also see in Last Action Hero a film where Arnold Schwarzenegger attempts to tread the line between his action movie career and his comedy movie career, which had started as far back as 1988’s Twins and would continue on to 1996 with Jingle All the Way. Now I’m not going to say he proves all of his detractors wrong, because Arnie sounds too stiff even for action sometimes much less comedy, but honestly he pulls it off well here. Perhaps because a lot of the comedy in the film is playing to his strengths, which is being an action movie badass, and Arnie parodying himself. There’s a pretty great cast here, Art Carney, Tom Noonan, Austin O’Brien, but Last Action Hero lives or dies on the strength of Arnie’s performance.
There are a couple issues here and there though. The runtime, clocking in at over two hours is a little rough. We do get a lot of fun set-pieces and comedy bits but at the same time it’s almost like we’re putzing around waiting for the proper plot to start. I’m also not a huge fan of Danny’s motivation throughout the movie, which starts off as him trying to get Slater to understand he’s a fictional character and become more self-aware, to getting annoyed at him actually developing some depth. There’s also supposed to be some sort of maturation subplot in there, with Danny becoming more brave, that I don’t think is properly explored.
The biggest problem with Last Action Hero however, is the way it teases a far grander climax than the one we actually get. The bad guy has the ticket which can go into any movie and take fictional characters out of it into reality, even having the characters explicitly state that it’s possible, they have the bad guy circling movie showings of Dracula and Jason & the Argonauts, and when the time comes for the big confrontation, what happens? Benedict (our villain) brings back a grand total of one guy. Now granted that one guy has story significance, but it’s implied that he’s planning to do this with King Kong and fucking Hitler. So now I’m in a position where I’m imagining an ending where Jack Slater fights off an army of movie monsters and Nazis, and I’m stuck with this far less epic ending. So now my enjoyment of the movie is tainted, because I have to wonder what could have been. Not the best idea guys.
Still I’m a sucker for anything with a hint of metafiction in it, and there’s plenty of thrills here for the people out there who aren’t me, so Last Action Hero gets the recommendation. It’s the kind of movie for people who love movies, to take a look at them structurally and maybe even seek them out for yourself (I know I still need to see Lethal Weapon 2). If you prefer your Halloween far less scary and more fantasy, this is the film for you.
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