Last Action Hero is a 1993 Action-Comedy-Fantasy movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and directed by John McTiernan. I had, amazingly enough, never seen it until today despite being in the film’s key demographic. I am roughly the same age as the protagonist was when the movie was released. That’s right. The protagonist was a little kid. And that is one reason I never took the time to watch it. I don’t like child actors or movies with children in them. They’re almost always, for lack of a better term, cringey. But, I figured that this was a turn-your-brain-off action movie and that I could deal with an annoying little kid for two hours. Also, John McTiernan directed both Predator and Die Hard, so I figured that since he was behind two of the greatest action movies of all time, it was worth giving this movie a watch. And this movie is OK. But the story of my feelings toward Last Action Hero are way less interesting than the story of John McTiernan himself. So, I will try to cover a little bit of both on today’s Movie Tuesday.

There is a video version of this review here:

So, Last Action Hero had some very entertaining sequences. I liked Schwarzenegger as Hamlet in the opening act. And, there was a strong element of nostalgia. I know that we have been treated to the 80’s nostalgia for a better part of a decade now, but I think we will soon be experiencing a 90’s nostalgia boom. For instance, Bridgette Wilson’s character and Austin O’Brien—the little kid—both wear Reebok Pumps. If that doesn’t scream 90’s, I don’t know what does.

But, let’s do a quick plot synopsis. The movie opens with a stylized action film called Jack Slater III starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is a film within a film opening. I am going to do a major trigger warning here. The opening scene has the villain of Jack Slater III holding an elementary school hostage at axe-point. This was decades before Sandy Hook and Uvalde, and I imagine that the writers felt like the most evil thing they could think of was violence toward children, but even their imagined monster is no match for the monsters we’ve seen in the real world.

When the projector for the film slips out of focus we meet Danny Madigan. Danny Madigan is a kid who’s dad is dead. We learn that when the mom mentions that she didn’t sign up to be a widow in an early scene. He spends all of his time at the movie theater watching Jack Slater action films. He is friends with the elderly projectionist at the theater and gets invited to attend a private midnight screening of the new Jack Slater film—Jack Slater 4. Danny’s mom has to go to work and as Danny is trying to sneak out to get to the screening, he is held at knife-point by a robber who takes his stuff. I think the point of this is to show that Danny and his mom are all alone in the world without a male protector, a role that Jack Slater will fulfill in short order.

After giving a report to the police, Danny makes his way to the theater for the midnight screening. Upon arriving there, the kindly old projectionist gives him a magic ticket that was given to him by Harry Houdini back when the theater used to be a vaudeville joint. This magic ticket has the super power to catapult Danny into the movie.

Now, as a brief aside, I’m not sure that Harry Houdini would have approved of the intimation that he was actually magic. Magicians are often the first to point out that magic is not real and that what they do is illusion. None of them claim to actually be magic. I think that is one of the principles of being an upstanding magician.

Nonetheless, Danny finds himself in the movie with Jack. It is a slick, stylized action movie world and Danny spends half an hour trying to convince Jack that he’s in a movie. Some of this is overblown and silly. Like the introduction of the MC SkatKat-type animated detective who actually gets them out of a jam a bit later in the film. It’s totally dumb, but I appreciate the films balls. I will say that. They definitely could have kept things more on the rails, but chose instead to walk headlong into the theater of the absurd.

So, the bad guy is Tywin Lannister, and he steals the ticket from Danny and escapes into the real world. Danny and Jack Turner have to track him down and defeat him in Danny’s world. Jack and Danny’s mom have a scene where they bond and Jack assumes a surrogate father role despite having known Danny and his mom for fewer than 12 hours. It’s all pretty ridiculous. Finally, according to Hoyle, the good guys win in the end. Spoiler alert. It is a PG-13 movie though, so what do you expect?

And the movie is ok. There are plenty of explosions, plenty of action. It is surprisingly meta for the early 90’s. Of course, we had Twin Peaks and stuff like that in the early 90’s and it just seemed to be an era in film and television where people were willing to take greater risks. This is one of those risks that didn’t become a smash success. It didn’t even become a cult success. It is was born a middle of the road action movie and that is where it has remained in the nearly 30 years since it was released. They say the greater the risk the greater the reward, but that is just an axiom not a guarantee.

So, that is Last Action Hero. But I said I was going to talk about the director John McTiernan. Like I said at the beginning, John McTiernan directed both Predator and Die Hard. Those are two stone-cold classics. So, why haven’t we seen anything from him lately? I thought it might be because this movie fared so poorly at the box office, but the actual answer is way more exciting than that.

You see, John McTiernan did continue to make films. He made Die Hard with a Vengeance, The Thomas Crown Affair and Rollerball 2002. So the critical and commercial disappointment of The Last Action Hero didn’t condemn him to the Hollywood penalty box. Apparently he did that to himself by wiretapping one of his producers on Rollerball and then lying to the FBI about it. This got him sent to federal prison for perjury. He subsequently had to file bankruptcy, lost his Wyoming ranch and hasn’t made a feature film since. Sometimes I think the obsessive nature that makes you great at one thing, like, for example directing action films, can be your worst enemy in other facets of life, like, just spitballing here, your decision to wiretap your business partner and then lie to the FBI about it.

So, yeah. That story is pretty interesting as far as I’m concerned. It’s why we haven’t seen John McTiernan around much the last 15 or 16 years. It is more interesting than the story that made up The Last Action Hero, an ultimately forgettable movie that I would give a C-. Watchable, but not much else. Okay that’s all I got. Goodbye.