Released: June 18th, 1993
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austin O'Brien, F. Murray Abraham
Writer/Director: Shane Black and David Arnott/John McTiernan
[Review may contain spoilers. Please watch movie before reading, unless you don't care. Most of these films have already been released for a while, so they should be readily available.]
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In recent years, there's been an explosion of parody movies. Whether it be scary, disaster or vampire movies, they have all gotten the comedy treatment. Parodies are nothing new, they have been a part of film for at least the last generation with "Airplane" being the most notorious.
"Last Action Hero" does something that few parodies (At least, I consider it a parody) do, it's also a solid action film. It doesn't just go from joke to joke, but actually follows a lot of traditional set pieces for action films of the time.
It's a little ironic that this movie was released at practically the tail end of the testosterone, larger than life action hero era that was headlined by Schwarzenegger and Stallone throughout the 80s. While it was an okay representation of the genre, the style was showing its age. Like all genres, the big budget action flick was getting over saturated and showing fatigue. Hindsight is always 20-20, but I wonder if the producers felt the same thing and made this movie as a way to hopefully jump start it.
I enjoyed the integration of every crime action movie of the time, there's a little "Lethal Weapon" and "Die Hard" in just about every gag. It was smartly done, and didn't scream, 'look how cleaver we are,'
at any point. The introduction of an animated cat detective was a nice nod to recent resurgence of animated movies, and also a joke directed at MC Skat Kat from Paula Abdul's "Opposites Attract" music video. And having the ending be a call back to the beginning was a nice job of story telling.
Schwarzenegger gave his typical macho action movie performance. He has the catchphrases and the attitude that you've seen for the decade-plus prior, but he's added some comedic elements that don't fall flat. The writers do a good job of combining all of his most famous characters into Jack Slater, and he appears to have a good time with the role.
The movie overall is an entertaining ride that makes me reminisce for these mindless action movies. Sure, at the time the genre was fatiguing, but now they are few and far between that these films are seen in a better light than in their own time.
Rating: 6.5/10 -- Fun movie that does a good job of making fun of itself. Wish more parody movies were like this.
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