Schwarzenegger Season: Last Action Hero (Dir John McTiernan, 2h10m, 1993)

 

You might be asking yourself the question; "Hey, Thom, why are we ending a month celebrating the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger with one of his most divisive and least commercially successful entries?" The logical endpoint being Arnie's Caesar-like triumph into theatres in Terminator 2, bringing things full circle from unknown to icon. It's a fair question. In nine years, Arnold had gone from films where his physique and wish-fulfilment made up for his lack of acting ability in films that cost barely $10 million to being a smart, funny action star, as capable of playing a comedic foil to Danny DeVito as he was of blowing away entire armies of soldiers as any one of a number of interchangeable gun-toting heroes, in $100 million movies.

Arnold rolled into Hollywood in victory, and it felt like his success, and those of his contemporaries-Sly, Kurt, Jean-Claude, Steven, and so on-would never end. The god, though, was only mortal, the triumph undercut by the whisper, and another nine years hence would see Arnold, off the back of several underperforming films into his early fifties, and starting to look elsewhere, into the world of politics. The Austrian Oak had fallen, and the theatres of 2000 weren't much kinder to Sly, orthe other stalwarts of the genre. The action hero, as the 1980s and 1990s knew them, was dead, and there would be no sequel for them (or, indeed, in the intervening years since the turn of the century, much in the way of a reboot, despite the attempts of the septuagenarian Schwarzenegger, Stallone et al.)

Whatever happened, as The Stranglers say, to all the heroes? Somehow appropriately, the answer, at least in part, can be found in Last Action Hero. Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1993 reunion with John McTiernan, is best described as an action adventure that buddy-cop pairs Arnold essentially, (and indeed at one point, literally) playing himself as action hero writ large, Jack Slater across from a young cinema-going boy who finds himself in Slater's most recent adventure. What follows is a well-honed, if occasionally overwhelmingly self-aware film that spends about half its time doing the typical action movie motions, and half the time knowingly winking and pointing them out to the audience. It is a film that at once feels remarkably forward-looking, and a throwback to half a decade ago. It also seems, undeniably, the perfect place to explore the slow demise of the action hero, the changing trends in action cinema, and begs the question; was Last Action Hero always doomed to be the beginning of the end for its genre, or does the film deserve to be up there with some of the best Arnold ever made?

Let's start with the obvious. The year is 1992, Arnold turns 45, Sly is 46, Kurt Russell is 41, Harrison Ford hits the big 5-0-of the traditional major action stars of the late 80s and early 90s, only Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, and Van Damme are under 40, and, inevitably, long before it became every other line out of their mouths as they pushed on into their 60s, they're starting to feel their age, and begin to look elsewhere than breakneck action movies. Whilst the winds of change are already blowing for certain actors-Sylvester Stallone arguably doesn't make a single good film, with the exception of Demolition Man, in the entire 1990s, others are diversifying.

Willis, never exactly the typical action star, goes into dark comedies, and even dramatic roles, though Bonfire of the Vanities is, in all sense of the word, a bomb. Russell essentially directs the revisionist western Tombstone, and appears in the disaster movie, Backdraft. Ford goes into dramatic roles. Arnold goes into comedy, and so on. The important thing to state is that, by 1999, only Willis and Ford (arguably too idiocyncratic to be macho action heroes) are still regularly making action films, and even these will start to become few and far between by the dawn of the 21st Century.

In their wake come a new generation of actors; or rather, certain actors break into the mainstream at this point, others return to the mainstream, and some arrive almost fully formed. Keanu Reeves, a stalwart of enjoyable stoner comedies and teen dramas, breaks into the mainstream in Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break, with Reeves facing off against Patrick Swayze in an altogether more emotionally driven and at once more ceberal and more aesthetic take on the genre than previous outings. The even-more aesthetically driven Speed will cement Reeves as an action star. Will Smith, a rapper turned TV star, teams up with a comedian-turned-actor called Martin Lawrence and a advert/music video director, Michael Bay, to make the buddy-cop action movie, Bad Boys. He soon becomes a household name in Roland Emmerich's big on effects, short on plot alien invasion actioneer, Independence Day, and so on for Cruise and Chan and Jovovich and Snipes and the other 90s stalwarts.

The point being, of course, that Arnie, Sly and co were being replaced by younger, cooler, more-representative, and crucially, more relatable heroes and heroines. Gone were nigh-unstoppable he-men (and, honestly, Sigourney Weaver), in were ordinary heroes thrown into colossal events, using their wits, rather than their scupturally hewn bodies to win the day. No film sums this sea-change up better than, of all things, 1996's Executive Decision, where all-action hero Steve Seagal is offed barely half an hour in, leaving a team of techies and a flight attendant, (an early role for Halle Berry), to defeat a group of terrorists bent on chausing chaos. It's...the very sense of the action genre changing summed up in a single film.

But something else also happened in 1992 that would, undeniably, also have its impact upon cinema, and indeed culture as a whole. In November of 1992, as Last Action Hero rolled into production, George HW Bush lost the election to Bill Clinton, bringing to an end over 12 years of Republican control in the US, and, at a stroke, cut Reagan-era cinema down at the knees. Movies under Reagan, under the first of two presidents essentially brought into being by the media, are immersed, as the man himself was, in battles of good and evil-Top Gun, Rambo, and other films like it, essentially become extensions of the man himself-nationalistic, aggressively pro-American, muscular masculinity and as their adversary, more often than not dealing with the enemy without, be it Russian or alien. (I personally recommend Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era by Susan Jeffords for a truly in-depth discussion of this.)

Clinton-era action, meanwhile, essentially falls into two camps. First, films like Independence Day, Deep Impact, Armageddon-where our heroes must rally together to stop a (usually environmental or alien) threat, in lightly jingoistic terms that have the suitably weighed "America Fuck Yeah" vibe, whilst feeling inclusive. Indepencence Day, in particular hinges around a central trio of Jeff Goldblum's nerdy Jewish techy, Will Smith's Afro-American fighter pilot and Bill Paxton basically playing Bill Clinton with the serial numbers filed off, but most if not all of these epicly scaled action-disaster pieces included spectacle and most-if not all-of mankind banding together against an exterior threat. 

 On the other hand, we have films like Face/Off, The Rock, Air Force One, et al, in which the human enemy, far from the Commies and Ruskies of Rambo et al, represents one of two ideologies-either the almighty dollar, or their own self-interests (or occasionally revenge, or an amalgam of two or more of the three). Where a greater cause does rear its head, it's inevitably factionless terrorism, or cartoonish fundamentalism before the dawn of the 21st Century created a new, and very real threat from these caricatures.

In short, far from the forces of the Red Army (hell, even Bond, in Goldeneye, makes his villains post-Soviet), organised crime (your typical druglords, corrupt politicians etc-Reagan-era politics would have you believe they were comparable threats to the American Way of Life), or even an unholy marriage of both, the 90s either made its threat non-human, or a, in simple terms, factionless, axe-grinder or grinders out for what they could get, rather than what they represented, be it monetary or other personal gain. Moreover, Clinton had it in for the action hero, branding much of the action cinema of the 1980s, and a fair chunk of the televison, a bad influence on the impoverished young men of inner city America, with Arnold in 2017 chalking at least part of the failure of Last Action Hero up to Clinton. On first impressions, thus, Last Action Hero was inevitably doomed-with Clinton, the changing action market, and in perhaps the most idiotic decision of 90s cinema, deciding to go toe-to-toe with the juggernaut of no less than Jurassic Park releasing a week earlier, how the hell could it ever have succeeded. And yet...

We begin in media res with Arnold as fictional hero, Jack Slater, a grab-bag of action hero tropes that largely seem to be knowingly cribbed from the Lethal Weapon and other action franchises-divorced wife, healthy disrespect for authority, a loose cannon with a heart of gold-you get the picture. Slater storms into an armed hostage situation, shoulders off his superiors-including a merry boot to the groin for one of them that's delivered with groan-inducing one-liner, and confronts the hostage taker, The Ripper, an axe wielding maniac played by a (barely recognisable) Tom Noonan. The Ripper has taken a number of children hostage, and in the melee, he is offed, dragging Slater's young son off the roof to his death.

And it's here that the smartest conceit of the entire film appears. For, of course, Slater isn't real, this is a movie, and our true protagonist, Danny, a boy who practically lives for action cinema, has sat, in a ramshackle and faded-glory cinema, through another screening of Slater's previous adventure, whilst bunking off school. The projectionist, Nick (Robert Prosky) finally packs him off to school where he daydreams his way through (in what may still be the funniest scene of the entire film) Olivier's Hamlet, recasting the Dane with Arnold in full-action movie guise, complete with shotgun, cigar and preponderance of explosions. The film stumbles through its kitchen-sink home-life, that pretty much exists only to grant the audience sympathy for Danny's solitary existence (dead father, mother working long hours to make ends meet), a curiously violent mugging takes place, before Danny heads back to the cinema to, as a treat from the doting projectionist, see Slater's latest film . It's a needless bunch of padding for a protagonist that, as fellow movie-goers, we already identify with.

Megadeth cuts in through faux opening credits, we're introduced to our duo of villains, the Italio-American gangster, Tony Vivaldi (Anthony Quinn) and Benedict, his muscle and glass-eye wearing gunman (Charles Dance), who dispatch Slater's second cousin, (the final appearance of the legendary Art Carney), because, of course, it has to be personal, and the film picks up with Slater, chugging guitar theme and all, investigating his second-cousin's house, only to find a trap waiting for him. The house explodes, because of course it does, Slater gives chase, and via the now-magic ticket that Danny carries, he is propelled into the film.

And here, honestly, is where we need to talk about what exactly makes Last Action Hero work, and why it also bombed at the box office in the early 90s. We need to talk about tropes. By now, early into the 2020s, we are inundated with films that, from Marvel downwards, are keenly aware that certain tropes are happening. You can blame this one on Josh Weedon and Quentin Tarantino, who pretty much populated the early 90s with quippy, self-aware characters-whilst our characters aren't exactly aware they're in a movie, they have, suffice to say, an often heightened sense of the language and structure of stories, often refer to existing movies and media, and thus, quite deliberately, come across as identifiable to the audience, mostly because a) they're usually young adults, and b) most of the fans of these series and films talk like this anyway.

Back in the early 90s-or at least pre-Pulp Fiction, that essentially kickstarted this hyper-aware approach to dialogue, and by extension, to narrative, this was a rarity. Films that played with the tropes, with the building blocks of cinematic narrative, were a rarity. There are, of course, outliers, but at this point we get into discussions of Jacques Derrida and deconstructivism, and we don't want to talk about Arnold Schwarzenegger and a boy from the real world traversing meta-textual narratives of post-modernist takes on the 1980s buddy cop action movie for too long. So let's talk briefly about Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Like Last Action Hero, it's a box-office disappoinment. Like Last Action Hero, it's a gonzo attack on the very idea of what a film is.

This not only leads to the film breaking the fourth wall so much that it practically lies in tatters by the end, with one memorable sequence showing critic Leonard Maltin being attacked by the creatures after holding up a video of, and dismissing, the previous installment, but the single most batshit insane genius moment in mainstream cinema, in which the narative of the "film" is briefly brought to a halt inside the film itself by the titular creatures, before Hulk Hoga, in the audience of the cinema inside the film tands up and demands that they allow the narrative "film" to continue. Whilst cinema may have finally caught up in the intervening three decades, Gremlins 2 still feels remarkably fresh-and still wonderfully bizarre.

Cue carchase, and back to Last Action Hero, and its here that the penny drops, both for Danny, who suddenly finds himself caught up in his hero's adventure, and for myself-Arnold isn't simply playing Jack Slater, an almost ridiculously stereotypical action hero that is seemingly invulnerable and unstoppable in the grand sweep of the film within a film's narrative-he breezes through the car-chase, defeats a veritable army of henchmen, and speeds through explosions, flips, and all manner of vehicular mayhem. No. Jack is more complicated than that. Jack is Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Jack Slater-that is to say, Arnold playing an exaggerated version of himself. 

It's a remarkable conceit, and one that the film explores as it begins to escape the standard trajectory of the average action movie, although the film can't resist showing us the Arnold of Danny's world towards its impressive, if self-congratulatory finale, even as Arnold and Slater share the same scene. Again, whilst there are precedents-JCVD (2008) in which Jean Claude plays a down-at-heel version of himself, not to mention the upcoming Nic Cage inevitable of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, these are films a full decade and a half-plus hence. It's...remarkably ballsy. And yet, on those broad shoulders, Arnold-as-Arnold-as-Jack is a sublime foil to Danny.

As the best buddy cop movies do, as the duo are formally paired together, and the film begins to rumble into its actioneering middle third, so the mismatched pair begin to rely on each other, and despite Jack not believing that Danny is indeed from beyond his world, their partnership develops rapidly, leading to some impressively unique action setpieces, from Jack, his daughter, and Danny fending off an army of thugs who invade his ex-wife's home, to an impressively tense shootout at a Mafia funeral that takes in everything from an escape via crane to an exploding corpse of a previously flatulent mafioso.

Danny and Jack as a united front is just as well, because now this is Charles Dance's film, and whilst Beckett in another actor's hands would be the knowingly one-note thing that frankly, everyone else, even the great Noonan and Quinn, seems to be, very deliberately bringing to this send-up of the action movie, Charles Dance brings the superbly menacing sense that he brings to all of his villainous roles. Honestly, he might very well be the best thing about this movie, his array of glass eyes, his unnervingly cool demeanour and the lion's share of the good dialogue, not to mention that classic British Villain sensibility that McTiernan was almost solely responsible for creating via Die Hard. Getting hold of the ticket in a bungled action sequence, he promptly offs Vivaldi, and, escaping from Slater and Danny, travels into our world, with our heroes in hot pursuit.

As our heroes step from the world of movies to "our" world, so the film does something unexpected. Or rather, it subverts the expectations of what an action movie finale could be by basically playing things as absolutely straight. It's a moment of left-field genius. It is the moment that the strapping, muscular action hero dies, to be replaced, wholesale, with McTiernan's everyman. It brings the demi-god that is Arnold Schwarzenegger down to size. It is the moment that, undoubtedly doomed the film. Stepping out of the cinema, Arnold opens fire on an escaping Beckett, and...nothing happens. No explosions-the cab that the assassin is fleeing in gets a few dinks-and Arnold is forced to scrabble after him, rather than leaping into action.

Beckett, in comparison, is raised to the level of practical god-hell, Dance monologues, as he breaks the fourth wall between us and himself, intones that "If God was a villain, he'd be me"-he is unbound by the very same rules that now bind Jack. He shoots a man dead, bellows into the night that he's killed a man, and the real world, unbound by the rules of the simulcularum of cinema, shrugs, and carries on. It's practically an action movie answer to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; a hero and a villain suddenly aware they are painfully fictional, and taking this in very different ways.

The rest of the finale is, in a word, fine. Danny and Jack soon work out that Beckett, with the help of the Ripper, is planning to kill the real Arnold Schwarzenegger, (an enjoyably henpecked and work-worn send up of Arnold in the early 90s), the duo foil it, do battle with both Ripper and Bennett, and kill both in perhaps the final third of the film's only remission into typical action fare Finally, Jack wounded and close to death, is comforted by Danny, and the duo are eventually helped to return a wounded Jack to the real world by a cameoing Sir Ian McKellen as Ingmar Bergman's death. He recovers, and, as the movie ends, he rides off into the sunset, triumphant. With him goes, in a word, an entire era.

Perhaps, simply, Last Action Hero was trying to be too clever, too post-modern, a smartly thumbed nose to the very idea of the 80s action movie, with its greatest star in on the joke. Perhaps it was simply too derivative of the films around it, too smartly done for film-going publics, or falling out-of-time as Clinton-era politics, aging heroes, and changing tastes. Perhaps, at last, audiences had fallen out of love with their heroes in an era that no longer needed them. Perhaps, they were simply unlucky. Sometimes eras end, not with a bang, but a whimper. But Last Action Hero is far from a whimper. It is far from an ending. It is simply the next era of action cinema arriving, unexpected and unbidden, in a familiar guise, in a story that pushes the boundaries of the genre into a new, and undeniably exciting form. This is not the end of the action hero-it was never the Last Action Hero. It's merely another installment, another movie, another hero, among myriads-and, eventually, true as his word...
He'd be back.

Rating: Highly Recommended

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