LAST ACTION HERO
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 1993 David N. Butterworth/The Summer Pennsylvanian
Something was wrong with the picture.
On one of the muggiest days of the year, on the opening weekend of one of the summer's most eagerly awaited movies, the theater was eerily empty. By the time the lights went down, there couldn't have been more than a dozen people in the auditorium.
Why was the movie-going public staying away in droves? Could the word-of-mouth on LAST ACTION HERO have been that bad? Two excruciating hours later the answer was obvious.
It could.
LAST ACTION HERO, this summer's big ticket attraction starring that pumped-up action star Arnold Schwarzenegger, makes HUDSON HAWK look like a Bergman classic. It's a stupefying mess of a movie as big as the cigar-chewing Schwarzenegger himself. All the thought, wit and skill that went into the exhilarating trailer are missing from the finished product--a parody of action pictures that is neither funny nor exciting.
Sadly, the film has potential written all over it, and its premise is actually quite good. Danny Madigan (Austin O'Brien) is addicted to Jack Slater (Schwarzenegger) movies. At a private midnight screening of JACK SLATER IV, Danny is transported into the film by the power of a magical ticket. Here the young cineast grapples with the reality of living in a fiction, helplessly trying to convince the celluloid Slater that his charmed existence is all just make-believe.
Not a bad idea, and certainly one that provides a great opportunity to lampoon movie-making conventions. But the treatment is so poorly handled that self-parody quickly deteriorates into self-consciousness. There are some laughs in a video store where Danny tries to prove to Slater that this is only a movie--everybody's phone number begins with 555, for example--but for the most part the humor is labored and uninspired. Even jokes that should have been funny lose their impact due to poor timing and delivery.
The biggest jokes in LAST ACTION HERO are the bad guys. Charles Dance plays Benedict, a deranged sharpshooter with a traveling case of glass eyes. His performance is embarrassingly over-the-top; witness the scene in New York when he guns down an auto mechanic just to get attention. There's one funny sight gag involving him and his pack of drooling rottweilers, but as the heavy, he's about as menacing as a box of cereal.
Many memorable showdowns are suggested, such as Benedict's threat to unleash moviedom's powers of darkness (Dracula, Freddy Krueger, et al), but these never materialize.
Anthony Quinn appears as a "spaghetti-slurping cretin" called Vivaldi whose manglings of the English language are played for big yuks (he says things like "fourth wheel" instead of fifth wheel, or "in front of the 8-ball" instead of behind it). The audience isn't likely to giggle at his sophomoric linguistic butchery to begin with, and Benedict's endless explications guarantee it.
These villains aren't odious, they're tedious.
It's hard to believe that a solid action director like John McTiernan (who made the exceptional DIE HARD and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER) could be responsible for this turkey. The editing is choppy, the effects are surprisingly fake, the stuntwork isn't particularly spectacular, the music is horrendous, and the writing is mind-numbingly poor ("If God were a villain, he'd be me" smirks Benedict to the camera). Some scenes are completely gratuitous--such as the one in which Danny's apartment is burglarized--and others flounder desperately for intent. LAST ACTION HERO is so sloppily put together you'd swear it didn't even *have* a director.
You can tell the movie's in trouble from the very first scene, which is distinctly lacking in firepower. Hundreds of squad cars surround a building atop which a facially-disfigured maniac holds a bunch of kids hostage. Enter Jack Slater, from the snake boots up. Big cigar. Big frown. Big problem. Macho mockery at its cheesiest. "Focus!" yells Danny, as an image of Slater pumping "The Slasher" full of lead blurs beyond recognition. Perhaps he was referring to the direction.
In a summer that has already seen disappointing returns on some potential box office hits, you might be tempted to check out LAST ACTION HERO. Big mistake. There's not even a guarantee that kids will enjoy it--the two ten-year-olds down front were bored out of their skulls. LAST ACTION HERO is a poorly executed in-joke where everyone in the audience-- Schwarzenegger fans included--feels left out.
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