You can imagine a skeptical 1993 adult thinking “Wait, why isn’t he questioning this?” while someone today, who grew up on a heavy diet of Industrial Light and Magic visual effects and $200 million superhero movies, thinking, “Oh, yeah, this is how I’d react.” He immediately starts calling Slater out on all his catchphrases and genre tropes. He even uses his knowledge of the franchise to forward the narrative of the film in really fun, unexpected ways. Slater might have the muscles but it’s Danny who is the real hero during this section of the film. And the fact that Schwarzenegger—the infallible superstar of the time—was taking orders from this snot-nosed kid, couldn’t have felt normal for a 1993 audience (then again, John Connor did the same thing). Of course, now, we know Schwarzenegger isn’t infallible. He’s made lots of mistakes, both as a human and even as a politician, so the idea of him getting metaphorically smacked around by a child works that much better in retrospect.
Scenes in Last Action Hero constantly tickle our film fancy; a trip through Blockbuster reveals that Terminator 2 exists in this world, but it’s Sylvester Stallone who plays the T-800, not Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito voices an animated cat named Whiskers, which evokes both Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract” music video, Slater’s closet is just the same outfit over and over again. When Danny and Slater go into a police station they see both the T-1000 from Terminator 2—actually played by Robert Patrick—and Sharon Stone as her character from Basic Instinct. By 1993 those were two of the biggest, most popular films that had been released in many years and the fleeting cameos could certainly have felt out of left field. Today, we’ve seen movies like Ready Player One, Space Jam: A New Legacy, or even The Avengers and Justice League. We’re used to not just cameos but multiple different franchises and IPs smashing together. So watching now, these scenes don’t leave you scratching your head, they leave you smiling from ear to ear.
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The cameos continue, of course, as does the self-reference, which gets even deeper and weirder once Slater and Danny follow Benedict into the real world and face-off with the real Schwarzenegger. Tonally, this half of the film is a radical shift from the first. For starters, Slater’s movie world is bright and sunny while Danny’s real world is dark and rainy. So even visually there’s a certain disconnect. Plus, actions have consequences here. Bullets kill people, bones can be broken—both things that weren’t possible for Jack in the film world—so the stakes are raised by this change. Most importantly though, this shift sets up the payoff the entire film is centered on, Jack Slater in the same room with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s incredible. Schwarzenegger delivers two very different performances that play off each other hilariously and when the real one instantly buys into what he believes to be an elaborate stunt, it’s charming in a very movie star way. Which, again, feels like a modern reaction to an impossible situation. You could easily see how audiences at the time may have been more hung up on the logistics of the scene rather than its wonder.
That’s just the sense you get watching Last Action Hero today. It’s wonderful in a way that feels displaced from its own history. Famously, at the time of release, there were many, many things that reportedly contributed to its failure, from arguments over the script to putrid test screenings and more. But almost 30 years removed, none of that matters anymore. What remains is the movie as a singular work and that movie is just about perfect. It’s a time capsule of meta-movie-magic that John McTiernan and Arnold Schwarzenegger buried in their pasts. One you can now dig up, rediscover, and instantly become a mega-fan of, just like the characters in the film.
https://canvas.ubc.ca/eportfolios/43837/Home/Movie_Adaptation_of_The_Incal_Graphic_Novel
https://cdsc.libraries.wsu.edu/scalar/last-action-hero-schwarzenegger-is-movie-magic/users/902