Last Action Hero

Plot

Young Danny Madigan (Austin O'Brien) is a teenage boy living in a crime-ridden area of New York City with his widowed mother. Following the Death of his father, Danny who is a film buff, takes comfort in watching action movies, especially the ones featuring the indestructible Los Angeles cop Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger). He often is usually late to school because of watching the films at his elderly friend Nick's who owns the movie theatre and is the projectionist. When Nick gives Danny a golden ticket once owned by Harry Houdini, to see a early preview of the new Jack Slater film that hasn't been released yet. Danny soon finds himself pulled into the world of Jack Slater IV.

Danny's insists that they are in a film, but Slater believes Danny is just an imaginative kid - despite Danny's intimate knowledge of Slater's life and world. Danny soon becomes Jacks partner and attempts to help Slater solve his current case by leading him to the mansion home of the villain Tony Vivaldi. Unfortunately, this alerts Vivaldi's henchman Mr. Benedict (Charles Dance) to the pair. Benedict attempts to assassinate the two, stealing Danny's ticket in the process and eventually finding his way to our world.

Finding that a villain can win in the Real World, Benedict hatches a plan to eliminate Slater by killing Schwarzenegger the actor, after which he can bring various villains out of their respective films and take over our reality. Danny and Slater - vulnerable in our world and no longer protected by "plot armor" - successfully stop the plan and take out Benedict by shooting his glass eye with an explosive inside. This destroys Benedict, but Slater is mortally wounded. A desperate Danny attempts to return Slater to his world, knowing that in the world of Jack Slater the hero wouldn't be allowed to die, but Danny finds out that they are unable to enter or exit the movie screen without the golden ticket. At this point Death (the Grim Reaper) appears to Danny and Slater. Death had walked out of his movie because he was curious about Slater. As a movie character, he is not on the death list. Death gives Danny advice and tells him to find the other half of the ticket, which he succeeds in doing, and brings Slater back into his movie where his bullet wound is now a flesh wound and he is fine. Danny says goodbye to him and exits the movie. A recovered Slater then enthusiastically embraces the true nature of his reality when he talks to Dekker about his new plan, appreciating the differences between it and the "real" world.

Cast

Background and production

Last Action Hero was an original screenplay by Zak Penn and Adam Leff, meant to parody typical action film screenplays of writers such as Shane Black. Penn noted himself that it was ironic that the studio then had Black rewrite the script. The original screenplay differs heavily from the finished film and is widely available to read online. Although it was still a parody of Hollywood action films it was set almost entirely in the film world and focused largely on the futile cycle of violence displayed by the hero and the effect it had on people around him. Due to the radical changes Zak Penn and Adam Leff were eventually credited with the story of the film but not the screenplay, which is unusual for a film based on an original screenplay.

Schwarzenegger received a salary of $15 million for his role in the film.

Years after its release, the film was the subject of a scathing chapter called "How They Built The Bomb", in the Nancy Griffin book Hit and Run which detailed misadventures at Sony Pictures in the early to mid-1990s. Among the details presented in this chapter were:

Soundtrack

The film was scored by composer Michael Kamen, and peaked at No. 7 on The Billboard 200 chart. The album, which was positively received by active rock radio outlets, was certified platinum on August 24, 1993.

Release

At the time of its release, the film was billed as "the next great summer action movie" and many movie insiders predicted it would be a huge blockbuster, especially following the success of Schwarzenegger's previous film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It was released the same day the 20th Century Fox film Once Upon a Forest was released.

Box office

The film opened #2 at the weekend box-office behind Jurassic Park and grossed $USD15,338,241 on its opening weekend, for an average of $6,651 from 2,306 theaters, and ended its run with $50,016,394 in the United States, and an additional $87,202,095 overseas, for a total of $137,298,489 worldwide. In an A&E biography of Schwarzenegger, the actor (who was also the film's executive Producer) says that the film could have done better if not for bad timing, since it came out a week after Jurassic Park which went on to break box office records as one of the top-grossing films of all time.

Schwarzenegger states that he tried to persuade his co producers to postpone the film's June 18 release in the United States by four weeks, but they turned a deaf ear on the grounds that the movie would have lost millions of dollars in revenue for every weekend of the summer it ended up missing, also fearing that delaying the release would create negative publicity; he told the authors of Hit And Run that, while everyone involved with the production had given their best effort, their attempt to appeal to both action and comedy fans resulted in a film that appealed to neither audience and ultimately succumbed to heavy competition.

The film was released in the United Kingdom on July 30, 1993, and opened on #3, behind Jurassic Park and Dennis. The next weekend, the film moved up one place, before falling down to #10 by August 13, 1993.

Critical reception and awards

The film received mixed to negative reviews from critics. As of August 2015, it holds a 37% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes. The site's critical consensus reads, "Last Action Hero has most of the right ingredients for a big-budget action spoof, but its scattershot tone and uneven structure only add up to a confused, chaotic mess." Vincent Canby likened the film to "a two-hour 'Saturday Night Live' sketch" and called it "something of a mess, but a frequently enjoyable one".

Roger Ebert gave the film 2.5 stars out of 4, writing that despite some entertaining moments, Last Action Hero "plays more like a bright idea than like a movie that was thought through. It doesn't evoke the mystery of the barrier between audience and screen the way Woody Allen did in The Purple Rose of Cairo, and a lot of the time it simply seems to be standing around commenting on itself."

About the movie's failure and critical response, John McTiernan said: "Initially, it was a wonderful Cinderella story with a nine-year-old boy. We had a pretty good script by Bill Goldman, charming. And this ludicrous hype machine got hold of it, and it got buried under bullshit. It was so overwhelmed with baggage. And then it was whipped out unedited, practically assembled right out of the camera. It was in the theater five or six weeks after I finished shooting. It was kamikaze, stupid, no good reason for it. And then to open the week after Jurassic Park--God! To get to the depth of bad judgment involved in that you'd need a snorkel."

The film was nominated for six Golden Raspberry Awards: Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, Worst New Star (Austin O'Brien) and Worst Original Song ("Big Gun"), but it did not win any.

Home video

On February 3, 2009, Last Action Hero was reissued on DVD by Sony Pictures Entertainment in a double-feature set with the 1986 film Iron Eagle. It was released on the high-definition Blu-ray Disc format on January 12, 2010. The Blu-ray release presented the film in its original widescreen format for the first time in the United States since the LaserDisc release.