LAST ACTION HERO
A film review by Jon Webb
Copyright 1993 Jon Webb
I'd heard this film was "Goddard-esque" -- a commentary of film-making. But I found it to be a mess. It is neither a parody of action films nor an action film itself; it is something in between, and it fails at making you care about any of the characters, hence making the movie itself of little interest.
Schwarzenegger plays a movie character who is idolized by a young boy. The boy magically gets transported into the action film itself, which is a parody of action films with ridiculous coincidences and cardboard characters.
The thing is, you're supposed to be laughing at the obviousness of the action film inside the film while still caring about the relationship between Schwarzenegger and the young boy. But you can't do both.
The movie also contains a lot of references to other films, including brief cameos by people from other cop films set in L.A. (for example, Sharon Stone), an outrageous L.A. police station with women in S&M outfits, inside jokes (like having Joan Plowright introduce Laurence Olivier's HAMLET), and self-directed humor like Schwarzenegger appear in the film as himself promoting some store he has a business interest in.
-- J
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews