Last Action Hero (1993) A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp (C) 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: What must have sounded like a surefire idea on paper somehow falls flat onscreen. Arnold tries, and has his usual goofy charm, but he can't redeem this one.
LAST ACTION HERO (that's right, no "the" in the title) has one of the best premises I could imagine for a movie, and one of the least involving payoffs. It's about a kid named Danny, who's a fan of a series of Big Man With An Even Bigger Gun action movies, all named after its hero, Jack Slater. Jack Slater is played, of course, by Arnold Schwartzenegger.
One night Danny gets a sneak preview to see JACK SLATER IV, and by plot mechanisms too complicated to relate here, gets sucked into the movie. Literally. He winds up in the back of Jack Slater's car, ducking bullets, and pleading for his life ("My name's Danny -- I'm a, a kid!" he shouts).
What happens next has terrific promise. Danny is intimately familiar with movie conventions, and tries to use his knowledge of same to keep both him and Jack a step ahead of the bad guys (Charles Dance and Tom Noonan). However, Jack (not Arnold, but the character Jack!) is a tough nut: for instance, Danny points out that all the phone numbers in movies have a 555 prefix, using the phone book to support this, and asks Jack how they can do this when there are millions of people living in Los Angeles alone? "That's why they have area codes!" Jack retorts. And so on.
There are many individually funny moments. One, which is basically a throwaway, has Danny re-making HAMLET in his head as a Jack Slater movie. Another has about a billion cameos walking in and out of a police station, and a third (possibly the funniest gag in the movie) deals with who plays The Terminator in Jack Slater's universe. (No, I won't ruin it.)
Strangely, the promise never gets realized. Instead, the movies makes the critical mistake of taking its ricepaper-thin plot seriously, and gets gimmicked up with over-the-top action sequences that don't fit. One of the dangers of making fun of movies like LETHAL WEAPON is that the original material had a wicked sense of self-knowledge, and could kid itself openly, so making fun of something like that would be a fool's errand. LAST ACTION HERO makes that mistake, and as a result the movie gets bogged down in synthetic confrontations that are not as interesting as the movie's original leap of wonder.
There's more problems. The movie also fumbles its business with the line between imagination and reality -- fumbles it so badly that when Jack and Arnold finally DO meet, NOTHING HAPPENS. Nothing, that is to say, of interest or substance. We get a couple of pat emotional countercharges flung back and forth, and that's it. Where's the astonishment or wonder? And perhaps that's the biggest problem with the movie: it assumes that tons of cameos and lots of movie in-jokes will take the place of a real, sustained sense of wonder about what's going on.
Woody Allen, before his downfall, made a wonderful little movie about the line between cinema fantasy and gritty reality, named THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO. In its modest way, it did everything that LAST ACTION HERO never manages to touch.
Two out of four Big Fracking Guns.
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