An excellent analysis of a movie I can’t decide is awesome or ridiculous.

davidiserson:

Thanks to the wonders of Netfilx’s watch instantly feature I had the “pleasure” this week of watching the Arnold Schwarzenegger action/fantasy/comedy/fever-dream “The Last Action Hero.”  Like every good comedy, it rings in at 2 hours 11 minutes and took me three days to get through.  The film, which I had never seen before, is batshit insane.  Here’s why (I’d warn you about spoilers, but this really won’t spoil anything and you’ve had 16 years to see it.):

  • Okay, first background: “Last Action Hero” is about a kid, Danny, who loves movies.  Oh man, does he love movies.  When he’s supposed to be in school he’s seeing movies in this one theater where he’s the only customer and his best friend is the old weird projectionist, Nick.  Nick gives Danny a magic ticket that allows him to enter the world of movies and he does.  He ends up inside an installment of his favorite movie franchise, “Jack Slater.”
  • Jack Slater is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Jack Slater is also played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie within the movie.  That is, in the world where Danny exists, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a famous movie star that everyone has heard of, just like in real life.  This movie is full of confusing things, but that is particularly confusing.
  • There was a lot of talk as to why “Last Action Hero” bombed when it came out (and you can read about some of it in the great book “Hit and Run” by Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters) but I don’t remember anyone publicly coming out and saying the real reason.  The real reason is that the actor playing Danny, Austin O’Brien, is simply the most annoying child actor I’ve ever seen on screen.  He is in every scene.  There is no choice he makes as an actor that isn’t the most annoying choice possible.  His eyes get really big and his face scrunches up over and over as he exclaims every sentence.  This is also the fault of the writers, but Danny keeps saying the same line over and over again, “I’m in the movie,” but the actor delivers it as, “I’m IN the moooooovie!!!!!”  I remember watching the trailer before the movie came out and a particular line stood out (in the above clip, it’s at 1:15.)  He says, “Don’t shoot me.  I’m Danny Madigan.  I’m a kid.”  Kids don’t say things like that.  Ever.  14-year-olds don’t refer to themselves as kids.  I don’t know why but there is nothing in the movie that makes me madder than that line.
  • Danny is also dressed in this absurd way costume designers dressed kids in movies and TV in the 90’s yet I never saw an actual kid dress this way.  He’s wearing a flannel shirt, but it’s a flannel shirt with a hood.  And he has a faux varsity jacket, but the kind you buy, not the kind you earn by being on the varsity team.  And he has this haircut that looks like a bowl of wet wheat.  Also, at one point, he goes to sleep and the next day he is also wearing the same thing.
  • There must have been a studio note at one point that asked for a scene where Danny experiences real violence so he can contrast it with the movie violence.  So, about 15 minutes into the film, a junkie busts into his apartment to rob him and has Danny handcuff himself.  This pretty much never comes up again, except to let us know it wasn’t a fantasy.  He unhandcuffs himself and goes to the police.  The police call his mother (she works nights) and instead of rushing from her job to the police station because her son has just been beat up by a burglar, she says she’ll come home as soon as she can after her shift is over.  Priorities.  Also, instead of coming home after this horrific event, Danny goes to the movies like it never happened.
  • When Nick the old projectionist gives Danny the magic ticket, he does it after laying on exposition for the first time about how he always wanted to be a magician and Houdini gave him this magic ticket but he never wanted to use it because he was too scared.  But, even though there’s nothing special about today, he gives it to Danny and compel him to use it.  He tears the ticket in half and puts the stub in a box.  This way, when Danny loses the ticket and he spends the rest of the movie looking for it, I was able to spend that entire hour and a half saying, “There’s half a ticket in the box.”  Plus all this magic stuff comes out of nowhere and doesn’t mean much of anything except for giving that horrible child actor an opportunity to yell things like, “Houdini wasn’t faking!  He was magic.”  Also, at the end of the movie, Nick tells Danny that maybe the magic was really inside of him the whole time.  This is insane because the magic was clearly in the magic ticket from Houdini and Danny had absolutely no ability to go in and out of movies before he had his hands on a magic ticket.
  • Once Danny goes into the movie, where the real bulk of the film takes place, he spends most of the time trying to convince Jack Slater that he lives in a movie while they go from action sequence to action sequence.  Jack Slater doesn’t believe him but that doesn’t matter at all because we know it’s true and so nothing that happens in the movie within the movie means anything or has any stakes.  Nonetheless, it accounts for almost the whole movie.
  • The writers and director clearly couldn’t make up their mind as to whether Danny is inside a movie or ALL movies.  It seems that he’s only inside one specific movie but when they go to the police station, it’s a police station with tropes from every kind of movie.  Sharon Stone as her “Basic Instinct” character and Robert Patrick as the T-1000 walk out of that police station.  Also there’s a gag where a sergeant pairs everyone up with a mismatched partner, one of whom is a cartoon cat and another is Humphrey Bogart.  Actually Humphrey Bogart.
  • There is some weird subversive stuff going on at any given moment which is weird in a giant tent pole kids movie.  Jack Slater’s superior yells at him to the point where he’s just speaking gibberish though within the gibberish, he distinctly says, “The Diary of Anne Frank.”  I did not make this up.
  • The catalyst for the movie within the movie is that bad guys killed Jack Slater’s “favorite second cousin.”  They repeat this joke to death.  I hate this joke.
  • The bad guy gets his hands on the magic ticket and goes out into the real world.  There is some weird thing about him realizing that he can shoot people in the real world and police won’t come.  I don’t know why that is.  If you shoot someone in public in the real world, the police DO come.  I’m unclear about the point.
  • The bad guy decides he will commit crimes by taking bad guys out of other movies and have them work for him.  He really doesn’t end up doing this.  He just takes one bad guy from one Jack Slater movie and that’s about it.
  • The bad guy also has a plan to kill Arnold Schwarzenegger (the real one, not the character he plays) at the movie premiere.  This was clearly put in there as an excuse to have a movie premiere, have a lot of cameos and have Arnold fight with Arnold, but, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why the bad guy would need to kill Arnold Schwarzenegger to do anything.
  • The cameos include all the biggest stars in the world:  Damon Wayans, Jim Belushi, Chevy Chase, Leeza Gibbons, Duff from MTV, Little Richard and M.C. Hammer.  Yes this movie sure came out in 1993.
  • Once in the real world there is this whole thing about how things don’t happen in real life like in the movies.  Jack Slater can’t do things without getting hurt and can’t kill anyone just by shooting wildly, but this whole notion goes out the window really fast when it’s convenient for him to be able to do things like in the movies.
  • The magic movie ticket ends up on the street and into an art-house theater bringing the final villain out of the movie and into real life.  Death from Igmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.”  Yes, that Igmar Bergman.  Yes, that “Seventh Seal.”  Death is played by Sir Ian McKellan.  Yes, that one.
  • Despite all the talk about how movie characters can’t do the things they can do in real life, Death is omnipotent and can kill people by touching them.  This makes no sense.
  • Death, in all his brilliance, is also the one to tell Danny that the other half of the movie ticket is in the box.  Yes, Danny needed an otherworldly omnipotent being to tell him what everyone in the world already figured out.  I don’t think the magic WAS really inside Danny the whole time.