In Defence Of Last Action Hero
6. A Movie Ahead Of Its Time
An infamously terrible test screening of Last Action Hero had audiences respond with choice quotes such as, "the movie laid there like a big fried egg" and dubbing it, "Willy Wonka with guns" (like that's a bad thing!?).
Is it not conceivable that the movie was just a little too clever for its own good, and therefore ahead of its time? After all, in addition to releasing amid expectations that it would be another T2, Last Action Hero preceded successful meta genre films such as Wes Craven's New Nightmare and Scream, not to mention Galaxy Quest and, more recently, the Jump Street movies.
It's easy to see how, in our ultra-ironic, sardonic Information Age, a movie like this would've been decidedly more successful. Give a vehicle like this to The Rock, give it some Deadpool-esque viral marketing and you've got a solid success on your hands, if not a mammoth smash hit.
Back in 1993, though, audiences didn't quite know what to do with something so brazenly self-aware, especially as its cachet of pop-culture references weren't exactly narrow. In addition to giving Robert Patrick's T-1000 and Sharon Stone's Catherine Tramell cameos, there are nods to the Oscar-winning movie Amadeus and Ingmar Bergman's 1957 existential masterpiece The Seventh Seal, among other more niche movies.
While to a contemporary audience familiar with the postmodern pop-culture vomit of shows like Family Guy, these seemingly scattershot touchstones might coalesce into a more acceptable whole, 25 years ago the mainstream crowd couldn't make head or tail of it.
It might seem awfully snotty to say "some people just don't get it", but if you can't find the humour in a fake trailer for a Schwarzenegger-starring action movie adaptation of Hamlet, there may be no helping you. Not everything works in the movie - the addition of a Danny DeVito-voiced cartoon cat sidekick might be one step too silly - but it's at least easy to see why it still has its passionate cheerleaders a quarter of a century later.
That's to say little of the movie's overall desire to lampoon the very notion of action movies themselves, achieved by the live-wire synergy between co-writer Shane Black and John McTiernan...