“Well, listen to this one: Rubber baby buggy bumpers! Ha! You didn’t know I’m gonna say dat, did you?!”
Thirty years on is one of those films that was largely left in the dust back in ’93 by Jurassic Park—some people consider it a dud, others consider it a surprisingly prescient take on our current trends of metacommentary, but as far as its star’s cinematography goes, it’s certainly something different. Here’s my take on John McTiernan’s Last Action Hero.
It’s the early 90s, and eighties extravagance is slowly on its way out—not for too much more could you ride by on mere bicep sweat and a hundred million lead casings punctuated by one-liners. But that being said, much like how in a few years Scream would still lampoon the horror tropes of that same prior decade, they remained fresh in people’s minds—and who better, apparently, to parody it than the man who partly made that trend, Arnold Schwarzenegger himself?
And so we enter our premise following a young kid called Danny (Austin O’Brien). With a single mother and living in a rather run-down crime-ridden neighborhood, one of his main forms of escapism is the action Jack Slater series, where a super-cop played by Arnold in-universe as well goes on a series of increasingly over the top and melodramatic adventures. By chance, he ends up in a screening where a magical ticket apparently from Houdini himself lets him actually enter the world of the next Slater instalment…yeah, it’s a little weak. The script ended up going through several iterations, ironically in part from action writer Shane Black, with the original being rather darker—and it’s this strange ticket plot line that got a fair bit of flak on release.
Nevertheless, that’s not to say we don’t have our share of things to remember—among them Charles Dance himself as our bad guy assassin who’s perhaps smarter than our heroes might anticipate with regards to the situation. We have everything from Slater being quizzed on why a home-grown American asskicker sounds so Austrian (“Eggzent? Vat eggzent?”) and even Danny realizing that he’s more likely to be comic relief that gets blown up than a plucky sidekick.
And that’s before we get into the darker stuff, presumably what’s leftover from the early versions—where Slater, it turns out, resents the increasingly ridiculous escapades he has to go through that have to resort to scything through his extended family just to raise the stakes. He lives in a dingy apartment where he has to constantly shoot random assassins appearing out of nowhere, his wiseass phone calls with his ex are all just a front…there’s something to be said about the way it touches on franchises putting characters through constant wringers until their emotional stakes stop to have that much meaning. Thirty years on, and with certain series being drawn out still with stranger plot twists, and it still rings pretty true.
That being said, it’s hard to deny it’s kind of uneven—it’s all a bit too long for its own good, with some gags that just fall flat or come out of nowhere (like an inexplicable cartoon cat, because…of course). And yet, there’s still just enough to keep watching—like scenes nearer the end in the ‘real world’ where Schwarzenegger ends up playing a parody version of himself. It’s something that, at least at the time, was arguably rather brave—and it’s not something I can really see say, Tom Cruise or Dwayne Johnson really doing.
As such I can’t call it the underrated gem some make it out to be, but it’s certainly not terrible as others have claimed—between musings on how important even fiction can be to those who perhaps had parental voids in their lives, to Arnold playing Hamlet as armed with grenades, to of course Charles Dance trying to break reality…I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that much enjoyable at least. In a current world of meta commentary and smartass TV shows spoofing any genre imaginable, it’s both a product of the times, and something that still feels like something someone might try to make today. It’s comparatively cruder in that commentary, yet simultaneously more heartfelt. Compared to his subsequent nineties excursions, like the somewhat backside-numbing True Lies, it definitely feels like something Arnold was trying to branch out in career-wise—not as slick, but more interesting at least…
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