Redux: Last Action Hero.

Redux #576: Last Action Hero.

Cast: 

Arnold Schwarzenegger (Detective Jack Slater / Arnold Schwarzenegger), Austin O'Brien (Danny Madigan), Charles Dance (Mr. Benedict), Robert Prosky (Nick), Tom Noonan (the Ripper / Tom Noonan), Frank McRae (Lieutenant Dekker), Anthony Quinn (Tony Vivaldi), Bridgette Wilson (Whitney Slater / Meredith Caprice), F. Murray Abraham (John Practice), Mercedes Ruehl (Irene Madigan), Art Carney (Frank Slater), Professor Toru Tanaka ("Tough Asian Man"), Ryan Todd (Andrew Slater), Jeffrey Braer (Skeezy), and Bobbie Brown (Video Babe) Directed by John McTiernan (#014 - Die Hard, #018 - Die Hard with a Vengeance, #080 - The Hunt for Red October, #325 - Predator)

Review: 

"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."

It is sometimes fun to go back to the (perceived) hits and misfires of the old favorites, particularly when it comes to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Honestly, the fact that he was enough of an action star to warrant curiosity all these years later is a curious one, at least when you consider that he was originally a bodybuilder that listed Steve Reeves as among his idols. There was a long road between being dubbed in his debut with Hercules in New York (1970) to the bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron (1977) to Conan the Barbarian (1982) to being in movies that were boldly proclaimed to be the "big ticket of '93". Of course, Last Action Hero started and ended in completely different fashion from what anyone expected, but hey. Zak Penn and Adam Leff had met when taking a film appreciation course at Wesleyan University; later on, with a shared love of action movies and their cliches, they did a draft with "Extremely Violent" that basically was a flip of The Purple Rose of Cairo [1985] (in which a movie-star idol walks of the screen and joins the real world from time to time). Through a bit of puffery, they attracted an agent with Chris Moore and it eventually bore fruit where Columbia Pictures bought it, albeit so they could then get their own folks (credited folks and uncredited script doctors such as William Goldman) to do re-writes. For example, the Hamlet moment came from Penn & Leff, while the glass-eyed Mr. Bendict character was a Goldman idea, and the caper of disposing of a dynamite-stuffed gangster corpse (inspired by a book) came from Black and Arnott (in general, the original draft didn't even have the golden ticket). The result was Penn and Leff were given credit for the story while Shane Black and David Arnott (who basically thought of it as having the chance to do the "Wizard of Oz of action movies") were given credit for the screenplay. Filming was hectic enough that the studio basically released the movie as it was (i.e. ignoring test screening reactions) in order to beat the timed-release date of June 18, 1993 (one week after Jurassic Park) with a budget of $85 million, the movie made less than double of its budget back.

To be honest, this is basically a "Hudson Hawk" moment for me where I realize, you know, this is funny action worth appreciating. Eighteen-year-old me thought it was better as an action movie that wasn't as funny as it could be. Looking back, I think I just appreciate the cozy world that comes with a litany of action cliches and just going with the frenzied attention. It really is a cynical riff on The Wizard of Oz that makes me appreciate when I see on the screen and chuckle along with it. Incidentally, Penn and Leff actually did write it with Schwarzenegger in mind because of his "self-mocking personality" and being the biggest & exciting of the overblown action guys (evidently, you can read a draft here). Sure, they envisioned it as a divide between a smart real kid and a one-dimensional celluloid character rather than the wisecracking present in the latter, and sure, a lesson in not projecting himself into action movies is kind of lost in the moviemaking by committee. But goddamn it, I did enjoy seeing the pairing of Schwarzenegger and O'Brien in the long run. I once thought O'Brien "easily disposable if he wasn't our main character", which certainly seems to sell him short. O'Brien actually had made his film debut with The Lawnmower Man (1993) after apparently being impressive in a TV commercial. There is something to how the two work with each other that does have enough charm to help get the movie over most of the bumps in the 131-minute journey. Schwarzenegger just happens to be the type of guy who can make an action sequence look all the more entertaining with that certain cadence and it does work in his favor to have a little bit of fun in the freewheeling film world. It's messy and decidedly a guilty pleasure type of movie that clearly gave McTiernan problems that he at least stages with a few entertaining action sequences. Dance makes for a fun enough adversary in slowly eating the scenery in menace that seems to be having fun, and that goes doubly for the blustery McRae (not exactly as much for Prosky or Carney, but at least the latter has the excuse of playing the "poor tragic second cousin"). The best gag might be our hero reading a few cards that count down to one because, wait for it, there's a bomb. The litany of cameos and in jokes are basically hit and miss (I suppose Planet Hollywood was a big deal at one point, but a cartoon cat? A reference to Amadeus [1984]?) and being compared to Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) probably did it no favors, but I enjoyed what I saw to make an argument that the movie is sorely underrated. Life isn't just what you see in a movie because at the end, it's what you make of it: it can be adventurous, it can be full of itself, it can be charming, whatever. You just have to actually show up for it. In that sense, Last Action Hero might just be up your alley.

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

Song of the day, because I owe you one

One more in the chamber, a non-redux this time: The Shadow

Missing in Action 2: The Beginning.

Review #2389: Missing in Action 2: The Beginning.

Cast: 

Chuck Norris (Colonel James Thomas Braddock), Soon-Tek Oh (Colonel Yin), Steven Williams (Captain David Nester), Bennett Ohta (Captain Ho), Cosie Costa (Lieutenant Anthony Mazilli), Joe Michael Terry (Corporal Lawrence Opelka), Christopher Cary (Emerson), John Wesley (Master Sergeant Ernest Franklin), David Chung (Dou Chou), and Professor Toru Tanaka (Lao) Directed by Lance Hool.

Review: 

You might remember that with Missing in Action (1984), there were two movies done back-to-back about a man trapped in a North Vietnamese POW camp that eventually broke out from there and years later traveled with an investigation team wondering if there was any US soldier still out there. Well, the movie about the man going back to the jungle somehow seemed more commercially appealing than the movie about being in a POW camp, so with the planned first movie, they simply just named it "The Beginning". The script for this film (made for roughly over $2 million) was written by Arthur Silver, Larry Levinson, and Steve Bing. This actually was the directorial debut of Lance Hool, who had served as producer on films such as Wolf Lake (1979) and The Evil That Men Do (1984) while spending many years in the Mexican film industry. Hool has sticked mostly to producing movies, but he has directed three other movies as well, with the latest one being 2 Hearts [2020]. Chuck Norris once stated that his films "do deal with certain positive things", believing that people went to see them because of the feel-good endings and stating that one great thrill of his life was hearing people applaud at the end of Missing in Action (1984); he participated in those movies as a tribute to his brother Wieland and also remarked that Vietnam "was a tragic mistake. If you don't want to win the battle, don't get involved.'' Four years later, with a script written by James Bruner and Chuck Norris with direction by his brother Aaron, Braddock: Missing in Action III came out from Cannon Films, complete with yet another different supporting cast around its star.

You would think a movie where Norris has to at least sell the perils of being trapped in a POW camp (with a 95-minute runtime) would be an interesting prospect to set up a tense experience before the inevitable climax. But all you get here is just a movie too wrapped in flat routines. It's not enough for a POW camp to have a guy leading the way in sadistic torture, complete with an actual (dead) rat used in one scene with a bag, no he also grows opium for a side hustle in drugs too. You might say that a good deal of action movies has routines they have to live by, but some of them at least have the energy to back up any audacious moments. Here, you have a movie that is probably only truly interesting with a scene involving, well, a rat. John Wayne impersonation or not, Norris is just too stoic here, somehow having as little personality as possible. Oh may have some of the smug and sadistic qualities needed for an adversary this film desperately requires, but there is still something so hollow in the writing beyond what you might see from the old-fashioned exploitation films of yesteryear. Hell, probably the one thing that sticks out from him is that he and the villain have a fistfight at the end because they share the same rationale of "nah, I can't just shoot him, I must beat him head-on" before the ending decides that, wait, you gotta blow him up too just for good measure. Williams probably is the highlight among most (if not all) of the cast*, mainly because his struggle with his own surroundings as one with the illusion of freedom, but it can only go so far with such few scenes (one being a fistfight, naturally) that it almost seems pointless. The time spent in captivity might be interesting to those who probably thought The Deer Hunter (1978) was too subtle. The movie may believe it has the energy and commitment to have its first half of misery follow with the action-packed climax mesh well together, but it really just comes off as a puddle. I called the other Missing in Action "an action cheese fest", but at least it had gall to set forth on that goal. In general, the movie is probably best serviceable for those who cared about the first film, whether that is the dull sense of the word or not, but this is a movie made on the cheap that really needed fleshing out, because the end result is just too cardboard in its one-sided goals to rise above D-grade entertainment. 

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.

*Tanaka (Charles J. Kalani Jr) was actually a boxer-turned-wrestler-turned-actor and he barely has anything to do besides be the heavy. Incidentally, four of the main ten cast members of the film don't even have Wikipedia pages.