Arnold Schwarzenegger still loves his 1993 box-office flop 'Last Action Hero': 'That was a really fun movie to do'
He's absolutely right to adore the maligned film.
Jack Slater may be the Last Action Hero, but he's first in the heart of the man that played him — Arnold Schwarzenegger. "That was a really fun movie to do," the Austrian action star raved to Yahoo Entertainment about the 1993 meta-comedy during a recent interview for his Netflix series FUBAR. Helmed by Die Hard maestro John McTiernan, the film follows 10-year-old movie buff Danny (Austin O'Brien) as he lives out his blockbuster dreams when he's magically transported onto the big screen alongside his favorite hero, Jack. "McTiernan did a great job with that movie," Schwarzenegger says now.
Unfortunately, audiences at the time didn't agree. Released 30 years ago this month mere weeks after Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park chewed up the box office, Last Action Hero was Schwarzenegger's first pricey Hollywood flop after a string of era-defining hits bookended by The Terminator and Terminator 2. That failure wasn't an easy blow for the former bodybuilder to absorb. In fact, in the new docuseries Arnold — which is also streaming on Netflix — Schwarzenegger confesses to feeling beat up by the movie's tepid reception.
"I cannot tell you how upset I was," he remarks in Arnold. "It hurts you. It hurts your feelings. It's embarrassing. ... I didn't want to see anyone for a week. But you keep plodding along. My mother-in-law also said this all the time: 'Let's just move forward.' It’s a great message."
Fortunately, time heals all wounds — and also turns famous flops into cult favorites. Three decades after it slunk out of theaters, Last Action Hero is a streaming-age favorite among the initially silent minority that loved it during its theatrical run and younger viewers who have discovered it either on DVD or on its current home on Netflix. And those latter-day fans include some of Schwarzenegger's own FUBAR co-stars like Travis Van Winkle. "I've watched that one a couple hundred times," the 40-year-old actor happily admits. "It was the impetus for me to become an actor when I was a very young kid."
The same goes for Gabriel Luna, who has played Schwarzengger's nemesis twice — once in 2019's Terminator: Dark Fate and again in FUBAR. "I told him when we were doing Terminator, 'Dude, I'm living out my Last Action Hero dreams," The Last of Us star says, laughing. "I'm in the movie with you."
And we're right there with him. Here are the five reasons why Schwarzenegger — and everyone else — is right to love Last Action Hero 30 years later.
It's got a Top 5 Arnold performance
Let's face it: There's no besting the T-800 or kindergarten legend Mr. Kimball. Still, Jack Slater may just be the third-greatest role that Schwarzenegger has ever played, making equally strong use of his action side, his comedic side and his self-promotional side. The actor has always been hyper-aware of his own mystique and builds that into Slater's DNA to make the ultimate big-screen justice enforcer — think Dirty Harry meets Superman. And then in the third act, McTiernan and screenwriters Shane Black and David Arnott give the star permission to send up himself, making the "real" Arnold Schwarzenegger and his Planet Hollywood obsession a side player in the climax.
But he doesn't just bring the funny: Schwarzenegger also takes Slater to some dramatic places when he enters our world and suddenly descends from godhood to mortal status. Sure enough, when Jack sustains a near-fatal gunshot wound towards the end of the movie, it's one of the few times in Schwarzengger's career where you're genuinely worried that he might actually die. If we were doing the 1993 Oscars over again, Schwarzenegger's Hamlet moment alone would qualify him for Best Actor honors over Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.
Sorry, Willy Wonka — Danny gets the better golden ticket
Who needs a chocolate factory when you can enter Hollywood's Dream Factory? Danny's passage into Slater's world is facilitated by a Willy Wonka-like golden movie ticket previously owned by famed escape artist, Harry Houdini. That idea of a movie ticket earning you passage from the auditorium onto the big screen is something that resonated with both Luna and Van Winkle, who were both around 11 years old when they first saw the movie. "Who doesn't want to go through the silver screen and be in a movie?" Luna says with a smile.
And once he's onscreen with Slater, Danny gets to experience all the perks that come with being the lead of an action movie, including gravity-defying cars that can drive anywhere with impunity, animated cats working as cops and unexpected cameos from other movie characters like Basic Instinct's Catherine Tramell, The Seventh Seal's Grim Reaper and, of course, the guy who killed Mozart. That's preferable to a bunch of Oompa Loompas.
It features the longest (and funniest) fart joke in movie history
Mark the timestamp: 65 minutes into Last Action Hero, Jack and Danny head out to crash the rooftop funeral for Leo the Fart — the late mafioso whose body is being hijacked by Slater's latest nemesis, Tony Vivaldi (Anthony Quinn), to unleash a deadly toxin. The duo take it upon themselves to prevent this lethal passing of gas, an extended set-piece that includes them being taken hostage, stealing Leo the Fart's body and using a construction crane to attack a helicopter.
After navigating that gauntlet, they're able to drop Leo's body into the La Brea tar pits where he creates a gas bubble that only offends the other entombed critters. At the 80-minute mark, Jack climbs out of the pits and delivers the inevitable punchline: "Silent, but deadly." It's a super-sized, super-juvenile 15-minute fart joke disguised as an action sequence, easily surpassing other classic examples of the form — think the Blazing Saddles campfire scene or poor Seth Green's auto hotboxing in Can't Buy Me Love. You can't flush that achievement away.
Charles Dance steals the show
Sure, Tywin Lannister was a real piece of work — but even House Lannister's brutal patriarch would tremble at the sight of Mr. Benedict, Vivaldi's glass eye-sporting enforcer who becomes Last Action Hero's Big Bad. British television mainstay Charles Dance, who had previously popped up as the heavy in Eddie Murphy's poorly aged 1986 comedy The Golden Child, expertly leans into the age-old movie trope of the articulate English villain who peppers his language with fancy words and his actions with dastardly deeds.
As with Schwarzenegger, Dance's performance goes to another level in the third act when Mr. Benedict crosses over into our world and delights in discovering that he's able to literally get away with murder due to the fact that real cops are much less responsive to shootings. After shooting one unlucky victim, he announces his crime to an uncaring world in what's easily the movie's best-delivered (and darkest) joke: "Hello, I've just shot somebody — I did it on purpose." Talk about Dancing like nobody's watching.
It marks the end of an era with a smile
Looking back on the summer of 1993 three decades later, Jurassic Park's resounding box-office victory over Last Action Hero heralded the looming shift from the '80s action cycle of cops vs. robbers and/or terrorists or good soldiers vs. bad soldiers. While those match-ups didn't phase out of multiplexes right away, the '90s steadily started to pit a new generation of specialist heroes against dinosaurs, tornados, aliens and computer programs. By the end of the decade, even Schwarzenegger was fighting the literal Devil instead of another commando.
Seen that way, Last Action Hero celebrates the movies that made its existence possible, while also winking at their excesses — giving audiences permission to laugh on their way out the theater door and into the Twisters and Independence Days that would soon conquer theaters. No wonder Schwarzenegger found the movie so fun to make: It was the ultimate farewell party.
Last Action Hero is currently streaming on Netflix.
