In Last Action Hero, young protagonist Danny Madigan lives a life steeped in fantasy. Residing in a tough area of New York, a social outcast at school, raised by a single mom with no adult male role models after the death of his father, Danny gravitates towards the movies for his entertainment and inspiration. For Danny there's no actor like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and no series more beloved than Schwarzenegger's "Jack Slater" action extravaganzas.
Slater is everything Danny's not: strong, tough, fearless, a rule-breaker, and always quick with a one-liner when the situation calls for it. Danny is Jack Slater's biggest fan, so when the kindly old projectionist Nick lets it slip that he's holding an advance screening for Jack Slater IV, Danny knows he's got to be there. Nick's gone all out, having dusted off his best theater manager duds for the occasion, and presents Danny with a special gift: a golden ticket given to Nick when he was just a boy by none other than Harry Houdini. Houdini promised young Nick that using the ticket would release a powerful magic, but while Nick wanted to believe, a part of him always feared disappointment and so he kept the ticket whole. But now, with the passage of time and the realization there are more years behind him than there are ahead, Nick decides to pass the ticket to Danny as it was passed to him. Danny, after all, needs a ticket to get in to see a movie...and when Nick tears it apart and hands Danny's half back, he unleashes the magic pent up in the ticket for the last several decades.
Danny winds up not just seeing the newest Jack Slater picture, but starring in it as he's pulled into the film by the ticket's powers. At first he's amazed to be sharing the world with the larger-than-life (literally) Schwarzenegger, but then he realizes he's not sharing the world with Arnold...he's sharing it with Jack. Danny knows he's in a movie, but nothing he can say or do will convince Slater (or anyone else around) that they're all just characters in some scriptwriter's imagination, behaving and talking the way they do because someone wrote them that way. To the people in "Jack Slater IV", this is normal life--Danny's the one from a fantasy land, spouting off nonsense about how the "real" world works.
Problems arise when Benedict, the villain of the picture, realizes that not only is Danny telling the truth, but also the magic of the ticket works both ways. While in the world of Jack Slater, where his best-laid plans are foiled by often the flimsiest of coincidences and happenstance and the good guys always win, Benedict doesn't stand a chance against the big police detective. In Danny's world though, things are very different. The bad guys in Danny's world can win. Armed with the magic of the golden ticket, his formidable intelligence, and the knowledge he can 'gate' in other villains and gangsters from film history to his heart's content, Benedict crosses over to the other side. Danny and Jack follow him, only for Jack to discover the rules don't work the same way once you're on the other side of the screen, and stopping Benedict won't be as easy as the movies make it look...
Reading critical reviews of Last Action Hero from back in the day is painful. Bad enough the film opened a short time after Jurassic Park, thus ensuring it would never get the audience or the appreciation it deserved while Spielberg's dinosaur-sized adventure story earned (rightly) every accolade. But then to see it put through the wringer by a bunch of film snobs who had no idea what they were looking at, failing over and over to see the story for what it was, then passing that vacuous and ill-formed opinion on to the public who responded in kind with their own dismissal... Just...ouch, man. Big mistake.
Last Action Hero's peers aren't the likes of The Terminator and Rambo, but rather Wes Craven's New Nightmare and Scream. What those movies did to deconstruct the horror genre, revel in the delightful tropes, and bring our attention to the reasons we enjoy them and the lessons we've learned over the years, Last Action Hero does to the Summer blockbuster genre. But much like the fate suffered by New Nightmare one year later, Last Action Hero was guilty of being too far ahead of its time. Audiences in 1993 just weren't ready to witness their classic action set pieces put under the microscope, analyzed and dissected with their sins laid bare for all to see in all their 70mm Dolby Surround Sound glory. Unlike Wes Craven, who got a second chance to get the message out to its intended audience thanks to Kevin Williamson's screenplay for Scream, director John McTiernan and script re-writer Shane Black never went back for round two.
One might wonder why McTiernan, who had cut his teeth on films like Predator and The Hunt for Red October, would take on a project meant to deconstruct the one-man-army action blockbuster genre. The answer: Die Hard. Before the franchise and its star turned into walking codefiers of every trope in the book, the first picture took a relatively grim and straightforward stance with a "Joe Everyman" cop at the forefront of it all. Die Hard was based on the novel "Nothing Lasts Forever" by Roderick Thorp, a story about an over-the-hill police detective fighting to save the life of his estranged daughter when terrorists take over a building. While McClane is far from retirement age, his character is fraught with doubts and sustains considerable injury over the course of his encounter with Gruber and his men. The film isn't exactly what you'd call 'realistic', but it grounds itself firmly enough in reality and subjects its protagonist to enough abuse that audiences can easily buy what it's selling. Die Hard, perhaps unwittingly, deconstructed action movie tropes, although it accomplished this by building up a whole new framework of its own which led not only to sequels but also a veritable wave of "me too" projects. Who better to helm a film about deconstructing, ridiculing, examining, and ultimately paying homage to the action hero blockbuster than the guy who already did that five years earlier?
Last Action Hero suffered innumerable problems over the course of its filming, not least of which was the aforementioned Jurassic Park, which Universal pushed ahead in the '93 summer lineup specifically to eat into Last Action Hero's pie--a ploy which worked spectacularly in their favor. While Arnold himself (as Executive Producer) fought Sony-owned Columbia Pictures for more time on post-production, and in fact requested the picture's release be delayed several months so as not to go head-to-head against a bunch of Velociraptors, Sony didn't agree. Trailers for the film were cut at the last minute, and failed to give an accurate portrayal of what the movie was actually about, marketing it as the ultimate over-the-top action spectacle when it was really anything but. Audiences expecting a big budget picture with Arnold gunning down bad guys while tossing out one-liners were instead broadsided by a higher-concept meta-analysis of the genre which took itself surprisingly seriously outside the world of Jack Slater and his deliberately over-the-top antics. The death-dealing, high-flying stunts were all there, along with a killer soundtrack populated by A-listers like AC/DC, Def Leppard, Alice in Chains, and Megadeth, but they weren't the main focus of the film. Critics and audiences alike revolted against what they perceived as an affront to action films which, at 131 minutes, outstayed its welcome at around the hour-and-a-half mark.
Even with revenue in excess of $130 million, Last Action Hero ran Sony Pictures into the hole to the tune of twenty-six million bucks, going from a movie everybody wanted to see to a movie nobody wanted to talk about except to lambaste it for failing to deliver on an over-hyped promise neither the script, nor the stars, nor the director made. It was Schwarzenegger's biggest bomb to date, and most people, remembering how it went the first time, never bothered to give it a second chance.
I'm probably not the best candidate to give Last Action Hero a fair shake, since I was one of the few people who fell in love with it back when I saw it that summer in 1993. Despite suffering the first migraine headache of my life a few hours after seeing the film and puking up enough movie theater popcorn to make the smell of fake butter turn my stomach for months afterward, I've always held an affinity for this movie. The script is rife with great one-liners and character banter, and you can't possibly catch it all with just one viewing. Slater's immediate supervisor Lt. Dekker, played by Frank McRae, especially is perfectly cast and gets some of the funniest dialog in the film--the byplay between him and Slater is snappy and one-dimensional on the surface, but actually reveals a lot of details that are easy to overlook or forget about since they whiz by at high speed. The number of cameo appearances by other Hollywood veterans is also staggering, everything from Danny DeVito voicing an animated cat to a blink-and-you'll-miss-it homage to the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and a similar nod-and-wink to Basic Instinct. Tom Noonan, who would go on to play a horrifyingly creepy child killer in the X-Files episode "Paper Hearts" a few years later, also gives a bravura performance as 'The Ripper', the maniacal antagonist from a previous Slater film returned to life due to Benedict's tampering, and unleashed for Jack to fight again in the real world.
Did I mention I loved this movie...?
Last Action Hero came along at the perfect time in my life for such a film. Much like Danny, I was a teenage boy struggling to fit in, raised by a single mom in the aftermath of my own father's death. I too would often turn to fictional distractions from real-life hurts, burying my nose into books, video games, and movies when I wanted to escape. While critics ranted about a dull, over-long, and cliche-ridden story, I drank in the wish fulfillment. I enjoyed Last Action Hero for much the same reasons as I enjoyed Tron and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: they all postulated a world of adventure beyond our own, hiding mostly out of view and out of reach, but unlockable if you could only recognize the door and discover the key.
To its detractors, Last Action Hero was everything wrong with the summer blockbuster. To me, it made a big production out of everything wrong in order to explain everything right with the genre. Schwarzenegger especially delivers a poignant turn of emotion when he realizes Danny's been telling the truth the whole time, that someone else has been in control of his life from day one. Last Action Hero succeeds by forcing the audience to come face to face with an Arnold character who must confront a truth that leads neither to a happy ending nor an angry, revenge-driven rampage, but incomprehensible pain. Every bad thing that's happened to Slater in his life, from his divorce to the deaths of virtually every friend and family member around him, has all been to appease an audience which must appear to his eyes as cruel as those who sat in the stands of the Colosseum, cheering while blood spilled in the sandy arena solely for their amusement.
Are we not entertained?
The audience and critical responses were, alas, a resounding "thumbs down".
The laserdisc version of Last Action Hero comes in a deluxe two-disc gatefold package. The main selling point for this edition was its 2.35:1 letterboxed widescreen presentation, and in fact, up until its 2010 Blu-Ray release, this was the only way to see it in its original aspect ratio--the initial 1997 DVD release was a solely pan-and-scan affair. The subsequent 2014 DVD re-release is based on the Blu-Ray transfer, and is also presented in its proper ratio, so if you haven't made the jump to high-definition yet, don't worry--Jack's still got your back.
With a running time of over two hours, Last Action Hero needed two laserdiscs to hold it all. I'm not sure why, but Columbia Tri-Star utilized both the CLV and CAV format, with sides 1 and 3 presented in the Extended Play CLV format, and side 2 offered in Standard Play CAV. Usually discs that go with the CLV+CAV style of pressing save the CAV side for the finale, so as to allow for better picture quality and frame-by-frame options during the movie's climax. Last Action Hero deviates from this tradition, but the only reason I can think for it to do this was to make the transitions happen at more ideal times. The last thing you want to do is get up off the couch in the middle of a raging gun battle to swap discs, after all.
The audio sounds great, with both the digital and analog tracks sporting a 5.1 Dolby Surround mix, though Last Action Hero was the first theatrical release to use Sony's SDDS audio system and as such I believe it carried a 7.1 SDDS mix in theaters equipped to play it, something impossible to duplicate for home theater viewing at the time this disc was pressed.
This was a phenomenal LD release in 1994, with sound and picture quality far in excess of what a VHS tape could deliver. Sadly it's also a bare-bones release: you won't find any commentaries, trailers, or bonus features even though they had a fourth side available where these could have been pressed for little in the way of added cost. Much like Slater himself, the Last Action Hero laserdisc shows up, kicks a bunch of ass, then goes home to wait until the next time you need it. I can respect that. 'Disc heads can add this to their hordes for about $5, but unless you're a die-hard fan of the format, you're probably better off paying a few bucks for the 2014 DVD or 2010 Blu-Ray releases, both of which look better than this particular print and won't make you pause the film every 30-60 minutes to flip sides or swap media.
Whether you loved, hated, or couldn't care less about Last Action Hero, let me know in the comments. And if this article wasn't about a movie which interested you, don't worry.
I'll be back with another one soon. Trust me.