Reader Reviews for The Last Action Hero:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Rubber baby buggie bumpers
Comment: Remember the panning intro into the movie theatre? Remember the forlorn-looking gent with the smoke dangling out of his mouth attending the concession counter? Same dude behind the security desk at Cyberdyne. Abdul Salaam El Razzac. Not even IMDb has him credited. That's the first moment you know here comes Schwarzenegger's Sgt. Pepper. With all the same faults and virtues. Some call Last Action Hero Schwarzenegger's BIG mistake. And like Sgt. Pepper, it has its corollary inspiration, its movie version of Pet Sounds. Remember Altman's The Player? Came out a just a year prior to Last Action Hero. If you recall how the movie-inside-the-movie concluded The Player, what a cheap satisfying laugh, it's kinda the starting point to this flick. Just substitute Jack Slater for Bruce Willis, add AC/DC and a few thousand more miracles, many of them car stunts, and presto, a way funner movie. Deconstruction for the masses, ahead of its time, underrated ~ or maybe it's just a movie version of its own Mad magazine spoof. Some jokes land squarely on the jaw, others miss, but they sure keep coming. There's a lot of lurking visual puns and some of them are maybe mistakes. Not necessarily BIG mistakes. (Professor Toru Tanaka, last time around seen as Subzero "now plain zero," apparently makes the transition into the real world just to pointlessly vanish in a cab. Hello?) Truth in advertising: I'll teach you to be vulnerable, you'll teach me to be brave. Maybe Austin O'Brien didn't click and maybe the ending simply lacked a fitting last blast. Hey, even True Lies felt like it was 15 minutes too long. I can live with that. On the red carpet, Schwarzenegger says there's only 48 dead bodies in Slater IV but, hey, I read on the Kaboom site there's 45 in Last Action Hero. We're missing three. Or are we supposed to believe there's some sorta distorted difference between Slater IV and Last Action Hero? (Even Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band featured the Beatles in the audience.) Wouldn't want to nitpick, right Danny? This was the first Schwarzenegger film I saw. (Oddly, it's the kitchen 'real world' scene with the Mozart music, I remembered most vividly. The lighting is actually otherworldly.) Like many people, by the end of the Hamlet sequence, I was sold. And Schwarzenegger might BE the last action hero, too; no way am I gonna accept Nicolas Cage or Matt Damon. Last Action Hero is not my favorite Schwarzenegger movie anymore but what a great introduction to his career. Or maybe the career he intended. (He might be back. Wouldn't Schwarzenegger make a great Rearden or Galt if Atlas Shrugged ever gets made? Or, how 'bout cast as PRESIDENT in some thriller ... or comedy.) Just like Sgt. Pepper, Last Action Hero cotton candy vaudville for the mind, as another reviewer wrote, accurately. Come to think of it, Sgt. Pepper was my 1st Beatles album.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Self-reflexive Arnold film isn't as good as it could have been - but even OK Arnie is still worth a look
Comment: Like a large percentage of Arnold Schwarzenegger's work, this is a film with a strong fantasy/altered reality element to it that works quite well overall, despite at times seeming too beholden to action formulae, rather than being willing to take the fantastic risks it looks like it's going to. John McTiernan's 1993 LAST ACTION HERO was roundly criticized at the time of its release for being overblown and not delivering the goods that were expected from a $70-90 million (a lot of money at the time) film. It came in the wake of TERMINATOR II, a hard act to follow certainly, and also just after McTiernan's financially disappointing MEDICINE MAN - but with his big hit THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER still reasonably fresh. More importantly, the director had gotten his big break with PREDATOR, which was an important step in Arnold's rise to superstardom; this was their first (and to date only) reteaming. I suppose expectations were higher than any film could deliver, and when the film failed to ignite either critics or the box office (to be fair, it was always in the mighty shadow of JURASSIC PARK), the word "flop" started to get bandied about, and the cynics started to wonder of the star's decade of dominance was coming to an end.
The naysayers were partly right; this was the first sign of Arnold faltering, though it would take another five years before he really started to lose his lustre; and it wasn't his best film by a long shot, though it certainly looks pretty good now in comparison with some of his later, even more expensive and less successful outings like END OF DAYS. Basically the idea here is that we start off watching "Jack Slater III", an Arnold Schwarzenegger cop film in a sort of alternate reality that's pretty close to ours, and then our eventual sidekick character, an adolescent kid named Danny (Austin O'Brien) is revealed as watching the flick in a crumbling and decrepit old NYC movie palace. The early scenes here are very evocative - Danny is watching the film alone, friends with the old projectionist Nick (Robert Prosky), and his mother (Mercedes Ruehl) worries about him skipping school and only being interested in movies and hanging out with the weird old guy. Very Zemeckis-Spielberg. But soon we're in different territory as Nick gives Danny a "magic ticket" that he got from Houdini himself, tearing it and releasing the magic that allows Danny to be catapulted into the movie world of Jack Slater (now starring in the 4th installment of the franchise, brand-new and not even officially premiered yet).
So the "real world" kid falls in with the completely fake Slater, who is of course unaware that he's a movie character. There are some pretty good jokes early on - Slater's boss, the blustery Lt Dekker (Frank McRae) gets so angry and abusive if his regular berating of Slater that he becomes completely incomprehensible; Slater never runs out of bullets and never hurts himself; there are cameos from several costars of Arnold's from previous films; cartoon characters work as cops; etc. But the satire on action movie conventions is fitful and often seems to be used just to fill in the blanks between "real" action sequences, and the developing friendship between Danny and Jack, while sweet, just doesn't feel as significant as it should. Perhaps a Spielberg would have made it too shmaltzy, but here you're left wondering just how Danny really feels about the whole experience once it's over.
Charles Dance does a great one-eyed villain (with a different glass eye for every occasion) and Tom Noonan plays the other villain, something of a slasher-movie type monster called "Ripper". Anthony Quinn is around as a bit as Dance's employer who stupidly keeps making idiomatic malapropisms in the manner of Biff in Back to the Future; we know his minutes are numbered from the get-go. Art Carney has a nice little cameo as Slater's "favorite second cousin" and Bridgette Wilson is there to lend some serious hotness. There are some nice little specific movie references - Olivier's Hamlet transformed into Jack Slater's ("to be, or not to be...not to be" as he blows up the castle behind him) and Ian McKellen doing Bergman's death - but overall the satire is outweighed by action setpieces, and the film has a rather slapped-together feel to it, unsure as to what to do other than lumber towards a big splashy finish.
Still, it's mostly fun, and I have to say that I wasn't as bothered by O'Brien as I was on seeing it when new. I think Arnie was fairly into it also, and that's important. Probably average for his ouevre, and for all it's faults, another reminder as to why he really was not just the biggest but the best American action star of his era: he had the best talent around him, and he rarely seemed to take his image as seriously as people like Seagal, Stallone and Norris did.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Last Action Zero
Comment: This film is a seventh-rate Terminator wannabe.The acting is secord-rate & over the top mainly with Lieutenant Dekker.The action scences are quite decent at best .The celebrity cameos are pointless.Some jokes were funny but not all of them.Not to metion,the lack of realism in the film's "real world" segment.I give this film a 4 and a half out of 10.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Big gun!
Comment: Granted, LAST ACTION HERO (1993) is probably aimed at pre-teen boys, yet it's a personal favorite. I'm one of this film's loyal fans.
At the time it was making the theatrical rounds I worked at Sears Brand Central in their electronics division. We had a dedicated laser disc player that repeated every 30 minutes a selection of movie promos, plus Sears and other commercials. These discs were changed monthly.
For a couple of cycles, "Last Action Hero" was a featured item. The ad included some fine concert footage of AC/DC's "Big Gun." A portion of this track opens the picture's final credit scroll. Arnold appears in character during the Sears video while Angus Young does his famous schoolboy prance on stage.
The soundtrack of LAST ACTION HERO is a metal or rocker fan's delight. It includes cuts by Alice in Chains, Megadeath, Fishbone, Def Leppard, Anthrax, Cypress Hill, Queensryche and Aerosmith. Tesla has the title track.
The reason I'm particularly fond of this one is its references to classic movies, including Hamlet, in a fab b&w scene where Arnold as a grungy machine gun packing Dane says, "To be or not to be" and lights a bomb off his stogie. He tosses the TNT. Big explosion behind him and then a drolly given, "Not to be" ends the sequence.
Best of all is Ian McKellen's take on the Grim Reaper from Ingmar Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957). Honorable mention to Tom Noonan's horribly scarred axe-wielding villain. He and Arnold play dual roles: themselves the actors and their action film characters.
It's a great concept: young Austin O'Brien (as Danny Madigan) steps into a movie and then he and other fictional characters cross back into the real world. That L.A. police station on the other side of the screen is great. We also get a holographic glimpse here of Arnold's Terminator foe in cop drag, and Danny DeVito provides the voice of 'Whiskers,' a cartoon cat detective. Also here, Austin/Danny I.D.s a confused F. Murray Abraham as Mozart's killer (remember AMADEUS?).
At the video store, Sylvester Stallone is seen on a lifesize cardboard stand up display as THE TERMINATOR. Jack Slater (Arnold) raves about how good Sly is in the role to a shocked Danny. It's too funny! Oh, and other bad puns, like when Slater kills a villain with an ice cream stuck in the eyeball, he quips: "Iced that guy... to cone a phrase!"
Yes, I've seen LAST ACTION HERO many times and will many more!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Last Action Hero Blu-ray
Comment: I liked having English SDH subtitles on this Blu-ray disc as the DVD version of this movie did not have them.
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