Last Action Hero (1993)

Last Action Hero arrived in the summer of 1993 as a fifteen-million-dollar paycheck attached to a deconstruction of the very genre that paycheck came from. John McTiernan directs Arnold Schwarzenegger as Jack Slater, an indestructible Los Angeles cop living inside his own film franchise, and Austin O'Brien as Danny Madigan, the boy who slips through a magic ticket into the projection. It was sold as the next great summer action picture and instead opened second behind Jurassic Park, a humiliation from which its reputation has only recently recovered. The film's ambitions are formal, not moral. It wants to talk about the barrier between audience and screen, and it does so with a cartoon cat, a villain with an explosive glass eye, and a parade of celebrity cameos that includes Ian McKellen strolling out of The Seventh Seal.

Examined for contemporary social consciousness, the picture is a barren field. Its cast is overwhelmingly white, and its minority players, a bodyguard here, a police lieutenant there, exist as texture with no comment attached. Women appear as daughters, mothers, and video babes, and the film's own joke about the surplus of attractive women in the fictional world is a joke about screenwriting, not about gender. There is no racial argument, no environmental concern, no critique of capital, no interest whatever in bodies, minds, or history as sites of struggle. The satire aims at the clichés of the action genre, and it stays there. Nobody is lectured. Nobody is corrected.

Which leaves a film that is entirely about itself and nothing else, a closed loop of reference and in-joke. It is not preachy, not representative, not revisionist. It is a studio comedy that spent a fortune explaining why studio comedies are silly, and then got beaten at the box office by a dinosaur movie. Its cultural ledger is blank, and the blankness is not a failure of nerve. It is simply a film from 1993, doing what films from 1993 did.