Last Action Hero (1993)
- adamsoverduereview
- 3 minutes ago
- 9 min read
This was the latest pick for the Fridays of Fury Action Club, see upcoming movies and join the fun here.
Last Action Hero was released in 1993 to disappointing reviews, audience scores, and box office. I originally watched it as a kid about the same age as the protagonist, Danny (10 years old). I thought it was pretty fun, especially the villains, but I didn’t care much for the kid. My problem wasn’t actor Austin O’Brien’s performance, which isn't great, but that was true of most kid actors of the era. Probably the only person close to my age I actually thought was a good actor back then was Elijah Wood (still love him). It wasn’t even Danny’s stock early 90s-kid hair and outfit, which are terrible (so many layers, patterns, and fabrics!).
I always thought, even back then, the idea that children in the audience needed an insert character they could imagine themself as was stupid and showed the limits of adult and executive thinking. Robin is the rare exception who actually became a decent character on his own, but he was always my go to example. If I was running around the playground using the power of imagination, why the hell wouldn’t I want to be Batman? I don’t want to be some kid a little older than me who is pretty badass, I want to be the ultimate badass! Am I going to imagine myself driving a station wagon because it's more relatable? No, I am going to imagine driving a race car that is rocket-powered (wait, that might actually just be the Batmobile… I thought a lot about Batman as a kid). This one is a little different, though, as the whole plot centers around Danny getting involved in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action movie shenanigans via a magic ticket transporting him into the latest installment in Arnie’s fictional Jack Slater franchise.
Were other kids really imagining themselves hanging out with Arnold characters? I thought Jonn Connor’s dirtbike and ATM hacking skills were dope, but I didn’t want to live his traumatic life. Trying to nail down the goal and appeal here shows how messy and ill-formed Last Action Hero is. Every prior Arnold vehicle had been rated R, other than the Conan sequel and Kindergarten Cop (1990), which I remember getting some flack for how violent it was considering the kid-friendly premise. Kids (including myself) loved Arnold and watched his movies, and back then they would still market toys based on R-rated movies to us (like with Arnold’s movie the previous year, megahit masterpiece Terminator 2). Yet someone involved must not have wanted to admit that violent R-rated movies were regularly marketed to children, because both Last Action Hero and the fictional Jack Slater franchise within the movie are PG-13 (confirmed by the words Jack cannot say). Yet the previous Slater movie we see ends with his son dying, something most R-rated action franchises wouldn’t even pull!
It's not like the filmmakers are trying to be particularly responsible in how Danny is portrayed. He isn’t watching an R-rated movie, but he is still skipping school, worrying his overworked and ineffective single mother, and hanging out with an old man who seems to be his only friend and encourages his irresponsible actions. When did the creepy movie tradition of kids who are friends with weird old men start? Was it Back to the Future but it was less disturbing because Marty was a teen? Nick (Robert Prosky) can take his place alongside the old guys from The Garbage Pail Kids and Munchie as people I wouldn’t want a child hanging out with. Inviting Danny to a secret screening of the new Jack Slater movie alone, at midnight, in the city, when Danny is already in trouble, that’s the kind of boundary pushing illicit activity ya gotta watch out for. First he’s asking how you think he looks in his old usher uniform, next he’s asking if you want to see what he looks like out of it… And the gunplay, holy shit! I was born in ‘85 and remember things were different before Columbine kicked off our era of endless school shootings and greater concerns over kids with guns, but it is WILD just how frequently this movie has tiny Danny waving a pistol around.
As noted in my recent Action Club reviews, action movies had gotten bigger, dumber, and more expensive over the course of the 80s. I can see why critics who expected Last Action Hero to parody those kinds of movies found it lacking. The Jack Slater movie world Danny enters (thanks to a magic ticket given to Nick by Houdini) isn’t really a parody of specific action movies or franchises, other than trying to be even more over the top than most of them. It's more like a cartoon parody of vague ideas and stereotypes about action movies. The “partner assigning” bit feels like an even sillier version of a similar joke on animated series The Critic. There is a parade of endless cameos of varying levels of randomness. The running gag of all women in the movie world being hot barely works on the surface, as plenty of action movies have female characters who aren’t there as eye-candy. But then it takes it beyond that, to the point that they are all wearing ludicrous semi-futuristic latex wear that looks nothing like any real movie. I do love those costumes though, as both a pervy kid and a pervy adult (especially “video store clerk” Angie Everhart, one of my 90s crushes). It's sexless but oddly horny.
Then again, the movie is also extremely violent, but not bloody. Perpetual punching bag Al Leong (who we just saw killed by Dolph Lundgren in Joshua Tree the same year) gets an ice cream cone impaled in his head, but that must have been allowed because it was so cartoonish.
Otherwise far more people are shot and exploded than you would expect in a PG-13 movie, albeit bloodlessly. Slater’s movie daughter Whitney (Bridgette Wilson, patron saint of inappropriate mid-90s kid faves like this, Billy Madison, and Mortal Kombat) exists mostly to be ogled by Danny, and she also takes some surprisingly rough smacks (complete with impact-emphasizing camera moves) before brutally beating up her attacker. That moment really gave me pause in this “kid-friendly” movie, but it does also illustrate how dynamic and high-energy McTiernan’s directing is in the Jack Slater world.
While it often fails as a parody, there are still goofs and gags that land. The intentional excess also provides some entertaining action beats as people are launched 20 feet in the air and everything explodes. When Slater’s second cousin’s house blows up from multiple angles it is fucking glorious.
The villains are also a high point, just like I remembered. Charles Dance steals the whole movie as Mr. Benedict. He is a delight, from his frustrations with his idiot boss to his cool glass eye gimmick to his improbably quick and clever realization about the nature of his reality and the ticket (one of the more forgivable bits of script sloppiness/shortcutting). I wish Tom Noonan had more to do, but his general Noonan-ness and a gnarly make-up job make his few scenes as the Ripper memorable. For a while I was riding high and thinking I might love this as much as the cult following it has built over the years.
Sadly that started to flag in the back half of the movie. The whole sequence with The Fart’s gas bomb/funeral (another gag that feels more like a Saturday morning cartoon parody of an action movie) is a big, elaborate sequence with crowds, cool locations, and practical effects, but it didn’t excite me at all. Once the movie gets into the real world, things really start to fall apart. It does provide some good moments, like Jack having his first actual conversation with a woman. But removing the over the top action leaves only character and emotional stakes, of which there are none, because Danny’s “real world” and its characters are just as much thinly drawn movie bullshit as the “Slater world” except less exciting. And the movie has even less wit or bite for Hollywood in general than it does for action movies, as the red carpet sequence feels like so much wasted potential. I did find it kind of darkly funny hearing Maria Shriver’s biggest issue with Arnold is his constant promotion of Planet Hollywood, not, you know, his frequent philandering that resulted in him impregnating their housekeeper a few years later.
This is a movie where individual scenes or jokes work in isolation, but fit together awkwardly. It made so much sense afterwards when I read about the ever-changing script and behind the scenes drama. Original writers Zak Penn and Adam Leff said they set out to parody action scripts like those by Shane Black, watching movie after movie and noting specific tropes or beats to parody. Then the studio ironically hired Shane Black to rewrite their script. Penn and Leff’s script “was set almost entirely in the film world and focused largely on the futile cycle of violence displayed by the hero and the effect it had on people around him.” That explains the sad-sack moment where Jack admits to Danny he pays someone to pretend to be his ex-wife and calls his job to seem less pathetic, which feels completely out of place in the cartoonish mayhem of the rest of the movie. They also said there was no magic ticket in their version. In addition to Black’s rewrite, there were multiple uncredited script doctors, including Carrie Fisher, Larry Ferguson (who cameos in the movie), and even the legendary William Goldman. According to Black, director John McTiernan also ended up another cook in the kitchen, “McTiernan had made a lot of hits, so the studio said, ‘Let him do what he wants.’ And we watched as John rewrote the whole thing.”
The Hamlet scene came from Penn and Leff’s original screenplay. Mr. Benedict was a William Goldman addition. The Fart sequence came from Black and his writing partner David Arnott. The whole red carpet climax with real Arnold was a late addition during the endless rewrites. Throughout the entire production process studio execs bounced back and forth on whether it should be more kid-friendly or hard-edged. They bought a screenplay that was originally titled Extremely Violent, then decided it was too violent! It sounds like the only person who had a good time making the movie was Austin O’Brien, “Every day there was something amazing happening: a car flying over a truck or a huge gunfight,” he recalls. “And we had a big enough budget that if we blew something up and it didn’t look great, we’d do it again!” So the movie did work as a wish fulfillment for at least one kid. I loved the TV series Movie Magic in the days before DVDs and “making of” features, so the idea of watching these talented professionals burn through $80 million of car stunts and explosions actually does sound incredibly awesome. It also helps explain how this became so expensive, along with questionable decisions like spending millions to recreate the La Brea Tar Pits for a brief scene.
Once the whole thing was done, McTiernan had just three weeks to get it ready for release. He said it was barely edited, with entire sequences just dropped in as filmed. The biggest obstacle to the movie’s success was not the endlessly shuffling script and photo-finish in the editing suite, though. The movie opened on June 18, 1993. A week after Jurassic Park. After Terminator 2 people thought Arnold was unbeatable, but then Steven Spielberg, dinosaurs, and state of the art special effects combined for a truly iconic film event. Turns out a T-rex can beat the Terminator. Even Arnold knew they should give Jurassic Park some runway, but the studio refused his suggestion to delay Last Action Hero by 4 weeks. Jurassic Park was number one at the box office for three weeks, and made more in its opening weekend than Last Action Hero did in its entire theatrical run domestically. Last Action Hero may have finally burst the 80s bubble, as execs and industry types suddenly realized a big star with a big budget and big action couldn’t guarantee big box office. Careers and egos were affected. McTiernan went back to the Die Hard franchise for his first ever sequel. Arnold started doing more comedy and family films (not confused hybrids like Last Action Hero). Other than one last team up with James Cameron for True Lies, his 90s action vehicles saw ever diminishing box office until he too had to retreat to a familiar franchise with Terminator 3 in 2003. After that he quit major acting roles for the better part of a decade and became governor of California, which 20 years later still seems crazier to me than anything in Last Action Hero.
see other Action Club members' reviews here
Most of my additional info on the making of came from this article:
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