Last Action Hero (1993)

Last Action Hero (PG-13)

"No One Likes a Smart Ass"

The young Danny is a lone film lover who doesn't fit in with High School or the dangerous streets of his home town of NY, NY.  He'd rather be scarfing popcorn in old decrepit movie theaters with the house speakers blaring.  When his friend and projectionist gives him a sneak preview to the latest Jack Slater movie, the magic of the movie sucks him in, literally.  Finding himself inside the movie with his hero and playing by the genre rules, Danny tries to help Jack (Arnold Schwarzenegger) avenge the death of his second cousin from nefarious gangsters and the Machiavellian assassin, Benedict (charmingly played by Charles Dance (Alien 3)).  When the action spills out into the real world, the antes are upped and the threats become more real as the nonfictional world is threatened by the fictional ones.

Arnold's first Producer credit sees him fronting a horse of a different color called Last Action Hero, a post-modern satiric romp through the tropes and cliches of Action fiction amid our violent crime filled reality. The studio went all out, advertising via NASA and selling nonviolent action figures, then allowed the film to be stomped flat by Jurassic Park's scaly second weekend. However the failure of LAH is more likely due to the bad word of mouth and obvious misinformation and expectations of audiences & critics alike, both of whom missed the point entirely.  The dreary depressing real New York, with its rotting old cinemas and bloody knuckled muggers are the sour to the sunshine bullet ridden escapist fantasy's sweet.

The balancing act is astounding, the quality of the action and the humor in the face of general opinion proves the movie was ahead of it's time.  The stupid jokes are mostly on purpose, the 90s rock n roll attitude and soundtrack are too loud by half, the flubs and continuity errors are obviously intentional.  The movie laughs and whoops it up with you; it's funny bone is firmly connected to it's trigger finger.  Perhaps over the top humor and plotting went way over the heads of its intended viewers?  The smart script had numerous rewrites (ironically by one of the 90s sharpest action scribes Shane Black of Last Boy Scout fame) but in the end attains the perfect balance of funny and dark tinged fun.  Director John McTiernan lives in this genre, and is basically spoofing his own successes (Die Hard, Predator).  He delivers some great action sequences, visuals and heart while at the same time satirizing those same style of sequences found in dumbed down man-flicks with slo-motion leaps from the edge of you seat that we all know and love.  Huge advertising, huge budgets, huge expectations on everyone's part, Last Action Hero was almost doomed to fail.  Very few "got it," and most just stayed away.  Yet over the years cult fans, both Action genre-ists and art-house purists, have spearheaded its positives and home audiences seem to finally be "getting it".

If you squint just so, a murky undercurrent of painful nostalgia for the golden age of cinema and the love of single screen movie-houses can be seen running through the film's veins, skillfully rounding out the punchy jokes and quips with an adept melancholy for things long gone (that just keep on getting truer).  Last Action Hero is, most surprisingly, the funeral for all those theaters that have been torn down to make way for the multiplexes, for all the old men in booths upstairs who lost their jobs, for all those Houdini's who don't have anywhere to perform with gold gilded balconies.  Places where you can no longer hear the soft purr of the projector, or sit in the complete dark without advertisements or cell phone screens, it was Last Action Hero that eulogized them with a nod and a wink.  It was a unlooked for Roast of "the-way-it-was" and foreshadowing of "where-it-is-going".  Unfortunately, they don't make them like this anymore, and certainly never did.

7.5 Shooting Dynamite in a moving car while changing your Sony MiniDiscs out of 10 (GOOD)