LAST ACTION HERO
A film review by Alex Siegel
Copyright 1993 Alex Siegel
Shakespeare said, "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." This description fits LAST ACTION HERO perfectly. But first, here is a short synopsis:
Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Jack Slater, a character in a series of action movies. Austin O'Brien plays Danny Madigan, a boy who is addicted to Jack Slater movies. Danny leads a miserable, squalid life in downtown Manhattan. One night, he is transported into a Jack Slater movie by a magic movie ticket. For part of LAST ACTION HERO, he lives in the movie within the movie. He spends his time trying to convince Jack that he is only a movie character, while Jack goes about the business of cleaning up the bad guys. After a while, one of the bad guys, an evil thug named Vivaldi (played by Anthony Quinn) escapes into the "real world." Jack chases Vivaldi into the real world, and the action continues there.
This movie suffers from some classic problems that seem to plague big Hollywood productions. The biggest problem is a lack of focus. At the beginning, it seems to be a movie about Danny's horrible life. The movie portrays Manhattan as a filthy, crime ridden sewer. Now, I'm not a fan of Manhattan, but it's not this bad. When I saw this part on the screen, I thought, "Oh, this movie has a social message." But, I was wrong. The bits about Manhattan are meaningless and perfunctory. They are there only to give the movie some sort of atmosphere reminiscent of BLADE RUNNER.
When Danny enters the movie with the movie, LAST ACTION HERO enters into comedy/satire mode. Schwarzenegger tries to satire every action movie that he has ever made. I actually thought that this was the strongest part of LAST ACTION HERO, but it still became quite tedious. I think they wanted to create the pace of AIRPLANE, while keeping the cleverness of THE PLAYER, but it had neither. All though, I will admit that I laughed in several spots. The most annoying part of this phase of the movie is the kid. Danny is so damn clever and intrusive in every scene that the audience quickly grows to hate him. When will Hollywood learn that cute kids and action movies do not mix.
When Danny and Jack enter the "real world," LAST ACTION HERO enters action-movie mode. This is the strangest part of the movie, since they do exactly the sorts of things that they spent the previous hour satirizing. There are several bits where Jack is "discovering" the joy and pain of living in the real world, but I found them false. There is nothing real about the real world in LAST ACTION HERO. Mr. Schwarzenegger has been living in the fantasy world of Southern California for too long to have any clue about living in New York City. The sad part is that this is where the plot of LAST ACTION HERO begins to actually get going. But, just as quickly, LAST ACTION HERO returns to pointless violence and an endless stream of Hollywood in-jokes.
This movie was frustrating to watch because there was so much unrealized potential. The movie-in-a-movie gimmick is fun. The satire is quite funny at times. Vivaldi shows surprising intelligence and could have made things happen. I have heard that four different teams of writers worked on this script, and it shows. It is full of unexpected changes of mood and character. We go from a rape scene to something out of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE KILLER without even blinking. A lot of the action is completely out of place. The slim premise is simply not enough to support a full length, big budget picture. I can't help but think that they should have scrapped the whole project early on, and tried again with a brand new script. Unfortunately, the producers decided to save it by throwing more money at it. There is no doubt that Arnold's king-sized ego had no small part to play in this debacle.
I can only hope that Arnold and the Hollywood community as a whole learn something from this mess, but deep in my heart, I know better.
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