Think You Know Last Action Hero? Think Again

Last Action Hero Remains Arnold Schwarzenegger's Most Underrated Film

All these aspects of Last Action Hero coalesce to create something uniquely chaotic and brilliant. That chaos - exacerbated by behind-the-scenes tumult and a ballooning, easy-to-root-against budget - may have made it harder to see, but I still think that it's a picture McTiernan and Schwarzenegger can be proud of. Great movies can emerge from less-than-ideal conditions, and Last Action Hero is a testament to that. It's just unfortunate that its production and even Arnie's prior success stacked the deck against its favour. Had it been released at a different time, and been marketed in a different way, then maybe it would have been looked upon more fondly. Instead, rightly or not, Last Action Hero came to epitomise Hollywood hubris, the magic on the screen being obscured by gleefully critical trade headlines and the reams of money invested into the picture by Columbia.

In any case, it's clear that Last Action Hero's failure wounded both McTiernan and Schwarzenegger. The Netflix-commissioned documentary series Arnold - which reflected on Schwarzenegger's life and career - only devoted a few minutes to the movie, but lingered heavily on the emotional blow its reception dealt the actor. Schwarzenegger confesses that the reception to the film both "embarrassed" and "upset" him, while James Cameron - who reunited with Arnold a year following Last Action Hero with the relatively more successful True Lies - said that the actor "took it as a deep blow to his brand." If we look at the film in the context of Arnold reflecting on his legacy, then this level of upset becomes even more understandable. Beyond simply refuting his business instincts, if Jack Slater as a character possessed any personal significance to Arnold, then it wasn't just his brand that was rejected, but rather his immediate place in the Hollywood canon.

Such a position may not be in doubt today, where Schwarzenegger is widely considered one of the greatest action stars and athletes of his generation, but there was a seeming reluctance to take him seriously with Last Action Hero. Perhaps that was a result of his off-screen, stogie-smoking personality belying his mindful approach to performance, or as Arnold himself less realistically posits, a "political attack" for his support for George H.W. Bush in the 1992 Presidential election. In either case, the backlash towards Last Action Hero changed Arnold from a domineering force of the action genre into something of a joke, a decline hastened by Simpsons-style mockery and a middling pivot to comedy, bookended by bombs like Batman & Robin or unremarkable action efforts like Collateral Damage and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

What started out as a victory lap for the kind of action movie McTiernan and Schwarzenegger ushered in in essence became a send-off, albeit not quite the last hurrah. McTiernan followed Last Action Hero up with the magnetic Die Hard with a Vengeance, while Schwarzenegger starred in less emphatic but still enduring successes in True Lies and Jingle All the Way. Neither recovered their pre-Last Action Hero eminence, however, with both fading as forces in cinema in the early 2000s for separate and sometimes controversial reasons.

For all that said, time has and will continue to be kind to Last Action Hero, a film whose sincere yet meta introspection stands in stark contrast to a box office landscape that has become increasingly dominated by films that apologise for their own weirdness or vulnerability. That MCU-style, "well, that just happened" arrangement - which does thankfully seem to be passing as we exit 2023 - has also been accompanied by meta comedies that are nowhere near as incise as McTiernan and Arnie's genre send-up. Think Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One or the Ryan Reynolds-led Free Guy - movies that trade their existence solely on the basis of amassing as many pop culture references as possible, and never interrogate them beyond generic "isn't this cool?" status.

Last Action Hero avoids those pitfalls precisely because of the thing it was criticised most roundly for in 1993 - it had a heart. It took a genre specialist like McTiernan to marshal those discordant elements, resulting in a film that works as both a straight-action flick and a meta comedy. I'm not sure someone like a Landis or a Zemeckis had the baggage to make that work - at some point, that introspection would feel less introspective and more cutting. That may have been the intent with Penn and Leff's original script, but the end result is something more interesting - a flawed but weighty production that drew in a genre legend like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and made him confront a legacy that, in his time, was sorely underestimated.