Last Action Hero (1993)

It feels like dog-piling to jump on something so universally considered a disaster, but never let it be said that I'm the bigger person.

The plot involves Danny, a 12 year old boy who idolizes the character Jack Slater, an on screen action hero portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, both in universe and here in the real world. After a break in at his apartment, he retreats to his favorite theater to get a special sneak preview of Jack Slater IV. Given a magic golden ticket once owned by Houdini for reasons that feel very extraneous, he is transported into the actual film. Once there, he has to convince Slater that he's in a movie, because... well, that's not really nailed down either. But in his exuberance, the bad guys are made aware of the ticket and use it to escape into the real world, where they discover that bad guys can win, until the movie needs to be over, in which case they can't.

The movie intends to be a parody, lampooning the ridiculousness of action movie cliches. However, as mentioned by many a reviewer before now, Schwarzenegger was already parodying himself by 1993. The entire genre was a parody by then. And as far as parodies go, Last Action Hero comes off more like they took an actual action movie and added a few jokes. The observations they make read like a bad Buzzfeed list. Infinite ammo, bad guys can't aim, nobody gets hurt, all the women are models, there's a loud police chief demanding the hero's badge. Danny insists on trying to prove he's in a movie, which has a few funny moments, but the majority of the film is a by the books action movie with an obnoxious kid doing his worst Mystery Science Theater 3000 impression. Literally the entire Jack Slater movie is shown, right up until the big finale. Changing the rules, Benedict, the big bad's assassin, escapes into the real world. At this point the movie picks up slightly. We get an amusing series of events where Jack and Benedict both have to figure out the rules of the real world, which are still pretty unrealistic. Jack slams a car head on into a taxi and suffers no injury. Immediately prior he punches out a window without slicing up his hand, although he complains that it hurts. In another scene he rips a car door off it's hinges. And don't get me started on the finale, which involves jumping off rooftops, driving the wrong way through NYC traffic, and a Hollywood event that apparently has zero security. The only parts that worked were the crumpling car roofs as Jack runs across them, causing him to fall, and Benedict realizing that police don't instantly appear when he commits a crime.

Even in the real world, the movie still fails to do much with it's premise. It hints at a grander plan, but just boils down to being a half hour of what feels like another movie stapled onto the end of this one. Tonally, the movie is all over the place. Rarely are we made to feel like Jack is the one being naive in all this. He knows the rules of his universe and Danny is a delusional kid. Danny comes off as being a smug comic sidekick for most of the movie. Why he even insists on trying to prove to Slater that this is a movie isn't made clear. Why doesn't he have more of a blast bending the rules? Why does he try to break the movie instead of trying to use his insider knowledge to be the hero? Why does he tell everyone about the magic ticket so it can be stolen? That's not really being genre savvy, that's just being a great example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Why does the movie feel the need to set up a meeting between "real world" Arnold and Jack Slater just to have him think Slater is a celebrity look alike? What is the purpose of Slater's daughter? Why was this movie two hours and ten minutes long? Did someone say "Yes, we absolutely have to have the full Jack Slater movie in the middle"?