Last Action Hero [DVD] [1993]

John McTiernan (The Hunt for Red October) imaginatively directs this action comedy, which is an interesting failure with some fascinating ironies that make it well worth seeing. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays both a character named Jack Slater--a fictional cop hero who exists only in the movies (ie, the movies seen by the characters in this movie) and the actor who plays Jack Slater in the real world (ie, in the movie we're actually watching). McTiernan's hall-of-mirrors effect is fun, though Last Action Hero never quite identifies itself as a pure action movie, science fiction, a kid's movie, or anything else. (The expensive film suffered at the box office as a result and was roundly criticised for this ambivalence.) What lingers in the memory, however, is Schwarzenegger, playing himself, being confronted by Slater for having created an alter ego for film in the first place. It's a provocative moment: how often have we seen a major star blatantly wrestle with his actor's legacy in this way? --Tom Keogh

Jack Slater is an action-film hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. An old projectionist (Robert Prosky, Gremlins 2: The New Batch) hands a magic movie ticket to Jack's biggest preteen fan (Austin O'Brien, The Lawnmower Man), and the kid steps right inside the latest Jack Slater film, becoming the actor star's sidekick in gunfights and car chases. But when Jack's nemesis (Charles Dance, Space Truckers) gets his hands on the ticket, the fight busts out into the real world and Jack (à la Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear) refuses to believe he's a fictional character. Director John McTiernan churns some nifty scenes out of this setup, although the fiction-to-reality shuffle is not as deft as in, say, Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the plot needs the kind of logic and discipline found in that classic when-worlds-collide film Back to the Future. Still, Schwarzenegger has moments of wit and smashing action, and we get a faux-movie trailer advertising an intriguing new shoot-'em-up: "Something's rotten in the State of Denmark--and Hamlet is taking out the trash! --Amazon.com

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