Summary
When a movie obsessed kid gets magically transported into his favorite action series of films, he finds out the difference between a movie world hero and a real life one.
The Reputation
This is a film that I love. It’s a part of my childhood that has actually gotten better with age. How many times do you find yourself saying that about a movie you loved as a kid?
Unfortunately, this film also has a TERRRRRIBLE reputation. This film was a box office disaster of sorts. I say sorts because it made a decent amount at the box office. However, the film was so over-marketed that the advertising costs outstripped any potential profits they might have gleaned. That over-marketing also had a negative impact on ticket sales as many people saw the film as a cash grab which didn’t have any real substance.
Bad reviews from critics led into worse word of mouth as the very fans who loved Arnold Schwartzenegger movies turned out to see the genre and actor they loved being made fun of in a movie that they paid their hard-earned dollars to see.
For a kid like me, though, watching a VHS taped from a Saturday Night Movie of the Week, it was one of my favorites and remains so. Parts of the film appeal to the kid in me who saw it for the first time and others keep drawing the adult version of myself back to it over and over again. It’s not without its flaws, but many of the things people complain about when referencing this film are, to me, simply signs that they don’t really get what this film is doing, but more on that later.
Hey, Mikey, He Likes It!
Growing up, I didn’t see movies in the theater so most of what I knew of Action Movies were just what played on TV as PG-13 versions. In my head I have always preferred Schwartzenegger to Stallone despite the fact that as a kid, both were equally hard to understand. Probably, my liking of Arnold stems from seeing “Total Recall” on TV.
“Last Action Hero” is one of Arnold’s best films, partially because he is playing himself but also because he is in on the joke. This isn’t “The Expendables” where Stallone thinks he legit still has it (he doesn’t). This is a guy who realizes how he has made his money and fame, how people think of him, and is poking fun at it, in a loving way. It’s like many great satires; funnier when being made fun of by someone on the inside.
As a kid, this movie captures the adventure and thrill of all the backyard and schoolyard games where you imagine that you are larger than life, whether that was as Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, The Power Rangers, Spider-Man, or Robo-Cop. What if you really got to meet those heroes and live in their world? Would it be fun or terrifying or both?
Also, this is a film that doesn’t treat its kid like an idiot. Danny knows a lot about movies and that knowledge is useful. For a TV addicted 90s kid like me, it was one of the few times that I saw a kid that actually resembled me on screen. I may have loved a lot of movies with kids in them over the years but Danny Madigan is the closest I ever got to seeing myself, a sarcastic movie quoting 13 year old, actually being useful.
On top of that, this film’s PG-13 rating made it way more friendly to a kid like me, with action that wasn’t too intense but still a lot of fun, a cartoon cat detective, and a plot that even a youngster like me could follow.
Grown Up Michael, He Still Likes It!
As much as this movie hit for me as a kid, it landed even harder for me when I re-watched it as an adult, after letting it sit on a shelf for a few years while the internet took over my film education. By this time I’d seen Arnold’s other movies and not the TV edited pan-and-scan versions. I’d even seen more of Stallone’s terrible films (sorry, I’m not going to let a chance to slam him slip past me).
I was in for a surprise. I couldn’t believe how ahead of its time this film was. I mean, I remembered that it had jokes about the genre in it but the level to which this film went into those tropes and gaffs common to action movies was simply mind-blowing (and this is before anyone was even using the word trope). There were, quite literally, jokes that had me looking up the exact year this film came out, to verify that it was, indeed, just that far ahead.
Also, without my realizing it, this film had perfectly joined up with my MST3K sense of dry and sarcastic satire to form a perfect storm of Meta humor, way before I had even known meta humor was a thing. This is probably the first film I ever saw where “breaking the fourth wall” was intentionally used as device in such an abrasive, address the audience way.
When people complain that this movie’s humor isn’t as sharp or that the rules of the world break down at certain points, they are forgetting that the internet wouldn’t become a thing of common everyday use for most people for at least another 12 years after “Last Action Hero” came out. People weren’t accustomed to the parsing of every single little thing a film did in order to find “rules” which were breaking a film’s “canon.” That’s just not how people were watching it. It may seem crazy, but many people’s complaint, at the time this film came out, was that the blending of real world and movie world was just too confusing to follow.
Confusing to anyone who didn’t grow up on TV and Movies or understand intuitively how they were made and written, maybe.
Leaving aside the forward thinking nature of this film, Arnold’s funniest and most heartfelt performance, and a master plan that involves a dead fat man named Leo the Fart, there are, unfortunately, plenty of other things left to complain about in this film, even from my perspective.
The first is that Austin O'Brien (“The Lawnmower Man”) as Danny Madigan, the kid with a magic ticket, is just awful. He’s a horrible actor and has mercifully, not had an acting career that put him in front of my eyes very often.
He isn’t helped much by some of the writing, to be fair. Sure this movie was doing things people weren’t quite ready for and they made concessions, but that still makes some of the speaking out loud, to no one in particular, in order to explain a character’s thoughts feel pretty dated and cringeworthy.
It is also way longer than it needs to be. Again this may be due to the ravages of the internet on our attention spans but something tells me that even 13 year old me wouldn’t have sat through the full film, not edited for commercial breaks, without some ants in his pants.
The last thing that many people complain about is that the logic of the film seems inconsistent, at best. I agree, to a certain extent. Sure the film is a little hand-wavey for the sake of story, but not to the degree that people complain about. Death (Sir Ian McKellan, “The Lord of The Rings”) for example doesn’t actually retain his powers when he enters the real world as many online critics claim he does.When people complain about the logic issues of this film it simply reveals to me that they don’t get what makes this movie so endearing.
This is a film about the magic of cinema. It exults in the messy way that cinema breaks the rules of the real world in order to create an experience or feeling that is somehow unlike anything you can find in the real world yet hints at exactly what makes life so amazing and thus, ends up feeling true.
Danny hates that he is a weakling and has no power but Jack Slater has all of that, or so Danny thinks. When he enters the movie world he sees that it is all tricks and that the real world is where real heroes and villains are made. We slay dragons in film not because dragons are real, but because they aren’t. They become stand ins for what we are struggling with. They are rehearsals for life.
To then complain that this movie acts like a movie misses the point. People say “it satirizes action movies and then just ends up being the very thing it is making fun of, an action movie.” Yeah. The satire is NOT the point of the film. It is a device. The point is that real life is where you should be applying all of that intellect, logical thinking, heroism, friendship, and excitement. Movies are a great escape, but they are an escape: something we should hopefully come back from stronger, more engaged, more passionate; Better.
For a lot of film geeks out there, “Hugo” is a quintessential love letter to the power of film. “Last Action Hero” is my “Hugo” because I didn’t grow up watching “Trip to the Moon” or any other of George Milles other magical short silent films. I grew up watching superheroes beat each other up as a way of escaping the fact that I got beat up.
This film embodies the magic that a film can impart. That escapism is works best when it has you feeling like a hero, through the movie you are watching, and realizing that the magic is on the inside and it is in your hands to be that hero, or scientist, or husband, or astronaut, or friend that you want to be.
That is the magic of film and I, for one, feel it every time the projector light sparks to life and the house lights dim. I’m not there to see the real world. I’m there to see the magic I feel on the inside reflected up on that silver screen.
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