Last Action Hero

Last Action Hero is a 1993 American fantasy action comedy film directed and produced by John McTiernan and co-written by Shane Black and David Arnott. It is a satire of the action genre and associated clichés, containing several parodies of action films in the form of films within the film. The film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Jack Slater, a Los Angeles police detective within the Jack Slater action film franchise, while Austin O'Brien co-stars as Danny Madigan, a boy magically transported into the Slater universe, and Charles Dance as Mr. Benedict, a ruthless assassin from the Slater universe who escapes to the real world. Schwarzenegger also served as the film's executive producer and plays himself as the actor portraying Jack Slater. The film also marked Art Carney and Tina Turner's last feature film before their deaths in 2003 and 2023, respectively.
Last Action Hero failed to meet the studio's expectations at the box office, and was both a critical and commercial disappointment. Since its release Last Action Hero gained a cult following, with some noting it as underrated in Schwarzenegger's catalogue.
Ten-year-old Danny Madigan lives in a crime-ridden area of New York City with his widowed mother, Irene. Following his father's death, Danny takes comfort in watching action movies, especially a series featuring Los Angeles cop Jack Slater at a condemned movie theatre owned by Nick. Nick gives Danny a golden ticket once owned by Harry Houdini and invites him to watch Jack Slater IV.
During the film, the ticket stub transports Danny into the fictional world, interrupting Slater during a car chase. Slater takes Danny to the LAPD headquarters, where Danny points out evidence of the fictional nature of Slater's world, such as the presence of numerous attractive women and a cartoon cat detective named Whiskers. Danny says that Slater's friend John Practice should not be trusted as he "killed Mozart" (since he is played by the same actor as Antonio Salieri in Amadeus). Though Slater dismisses this as Danny's imagination, Slater's supervisor, Lieutenant Dekker, assigns Danny as his partner and instructs them to investigate criminal activities related to mafia boss Tony Vivaldi.
Danny guides Slater to Vivaldi's mansion, recognising its location from the start of the movie. There, they meet Vivaldi's henchman, Mr. Benedict. Vivaldi and Benedict killed Slater's second cousin, but Slater has no evidence and is forced to leave with Danny; however, Benedict is curious as to how Danny knew, and he and several hired guns follow Slater and Danny back to Slater's home. There, Slater, his daughter Whitney, and Danny thwart the attack, though Benedict gets the ticket stub and discovers that it can transport him into the real world.
Slater deduces Vivaldi's plan to murder the rival mob by releasing a lethal gas. He and Danny go to stop it but are waylaid by Practice, who reveals that Danny was right: he is working for Vivaldi. Whiskers kills Practice, saving Slater and Danny, who prevent any deaths from the gas release. After Vivaldi's plan fails, Benedict kills him and uses the stub to escape into the real world, pursued by Slater and Danny.
Slater becomes despondent upon learning the truth but cheers up after spending time with Irene. Meanwhile, Benedict devises a plan to kill the actor portraying Slater in the movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger, bring other movie villains into the real world, and take over. To help, Benedict brings the Ripper, the villain of Jack Slater III, to Jack Slater IV's premiere to assassinate Schwarzenegger. Slater saves Schwarzenegger and kills the Ripper. Benedict shoots Slater, critically injuring him. Danny disarms Benedict, allowing Slater to shoot Benedict in his explosive glass eye, killing him; however, the blast causes the stub to be lost. With Slater losing blood, Danny knows the only way to save him is to return him to the fictional world, where his injury will become a flesh wound.
The ticket stub falls in front of a theatre playing The Seventh Seal, where The Figure of Death emerges from the screen. Death is curious: Jack Slater is missing from his lists of when people will die, and Danny is slated to die as a grandfather. Death then suggests searching for the other half of the ticket. Danny finds it and takes Slater back into his movie, where his wounds instantly heal. Danny returns to the real world before the portal closes. A recovered Slater then embraces the true nature of his reality, appreciating the differences between the two worlds. Danny and Nick bond while reminiscing their past, while Slater drives away on the screen, waving goodbye.
Last Action Hero was an original screenplay by Zak Penn and Adam Leff, meant to parody typical action-film screenplays of writers such as Shane Black. Penn himself noted that the studio ironically then had Black rewrite the script. The original screenplay differs heavily from the finished film and is widely available to read online. Although it was still a parody of Hollywood action films, it was set almost entirely in the film world and focused largely on the futile cycle of violence displayed by the hero and the effect it had on people around him. Due to the radical changes, Penn and Leff were eventually credited with the story of the film, but not the screenplay.
Several script doctors did uncredited work on the script, including Carrie Fisher, Larry Ferguson, and William Goldman. Penn and Leff disliked various parts of the final film, including the idea of a magic golden ticket. In their draft, the story would not explain how Danny got transported into the film world.
John McTiernan originally turned down the offer to direct the film, Robert Zemeckis was under consideration to direct, but McTiernan later changed his mind.
Schwarzenegger received a salary of $15 million for his role in the film.
Some scenes were filmed in a dome adjacent to the RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. The exterior of the film's Pandora Theater was the Empire Theater on 42nd Street in New York. The interiors were filmed at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles.
Years after its release, the film was the subject of a scathing chapter called "How They Built The Bomb", in the Nancy Griffin book Hit and Run which detailed misadventures at Sony Pictures in the early to mid-1990s. Among the details presented in this chapter were:
The film was scored by composer Michael Kamen and peaked at No. 7 on The Billboard 200 chart. The album, which was positively received by active rock radio outlets, was certified platinum on August 24, 1993.
At the time of its release, the film was billed as "the next great summer action movie" and many movie insiders predicted it would be a huge blockbuster, especially following the success of Schwarzenegger's previous film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The film premiered in Westwood, Los Angeles on June 13, 1993, and entered general release in the United States five days later. It introduced the 1993 Columbia Pictures logo.
Last Action Hero was released on VHS and LaserDisc on January 26, 1994, and on DVD on October 7, 1997. On February 3, 2009, Last Action Hero was reissued on DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment in a double-feature set with the 1986 film Iron Eagle. It was released on the high-definition Blu-ray Disc format on January 12, 2010. The film double-featured with Hudson Hawk on Blu-ray and released by Umbrella Entertainment on September 4, 2019, in Australia only. An Ultra HD Blu-ray restored version was released on May 18, 2021, and featured a director's commentary track, deleted scenes, an alternative ending, and the original theatrical trailer, all in 4K. The film was re-released with Cliffhanger in a 2-Movie Collection Blu-ray pack on November 2, 2021.
The film grossed approximately $1.1 million in previews on the evening of Thursday, June 17, 1993, and opened at number two at the US box office, behind Jurassic Park's second weekend, grossing $15,338,241 in its opening weekend, from 2,306 theaters, averaging $6,651 per theater. It ended its run with $50,016,394 in the United States and Canada. The film was released in the United Kingdom on July 30, 1993, on 266 screens and again opened at number two behind Jurassic Park (on 435 screens) with a gross of $1.34 million for the weekend. In France it opened at number one with a gross of 21 million French franc ($3.6 million) in its opening week. It grossed $87,202,095 overseas, for a worldwide total of $137,298,489. In an A&E biography of Schwarzenegger, the actor said that the film could have done better if not for bad timing, since it came out a week after Jurassic Park which went on to break box-office records as one of the top-grossing films of all time.
Schwarzenegger states that he tried to persuade his coproducers to postpone the film's June 18 release in the United States by four weeks, but they turned a deaf ear on the grounds that the film would have lost millions of dollars in revenue for every weekend of the summer it ended up missing, also fearing that delaying the release would create negative publicity. He told the authors of Hit And Run that while everyone involved with the production had given their best effort, their attempt to appeal to both action and comedy fans resulted in a film that appealed to neither audience and ultimately succumbed to heavy competition.
Last Action Hero received mixed reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 40% based on 53 reviews and an average rating of 5.1/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Last Action Hero has most of the right ingredients for a big-budget action spoof, but its scattershot tone and uneven structure only add up to a confused, chaotic mess." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 44 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.
Roger Ebert gave the film 2.5 stars out of 4, writing that despite some entertaining moments, Last Action Hero "plays more like a bright idea than like a movie that was thought through. It doesn't evoke the mystery of the barrier between audience and screen the way Woody Allen did in The Purple Rose of Cairo, and a lot of the time it simply seems to be standing around commenting on itself." Vincent Canby likened the film to "a two-hour Saturday Night Live sketch" and called it "something of a mess, but a frequently enjoyable one". Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote: "Last Action Hero makes such a strenuous show of winking at the audience (and itself) that it seems to be celebrating nothing so much as its own awfulness. In a sense, the movie's incipient commercial failure completes it aesthetically." Variety called it "a joyless, soulless machine of a movie, an $80 million-plus mishmash of fantasy, industry in-jokes, self-referential parody, film-buff gags and too-big action set-pieces." Halliwell's Film Guide described it as "a film that tries to have it both ways, simultaneously mocking and celebrating the conventions of action movies, which leaves audiences, as well as the actors and director, in a state of bewildered confusion". John Ferguson of Radio Times was more positive, awarding it four stars out of five and stating, "An Arnold Schwarzenegger backlash had been on the cards for some time and when this extravaganza was released the knives were well and truly out. It was actually all a little unfair, because this is a smart, funny blockbuster [...] Schwarzenegger has rarely been better and he is backed up by a never-ending stream of star names in cameo roles [...] And, although McTiernan has fun spoofing the conventions of the action genre, he still manages to slip in some spectacular set pieces."
About the film's failure and critical response, John McTiernan said:
Later Schwarzenegger blamed the film's poor performance on bad press and the election of Democratic president Bill Clinton, which he said influenced audiences to see 1980s action film stars as lowbrow. In 2017, he said streaming services gave the film its chance to reach new audiences unencumbered by the bad press. In Netflix's three-part docuseries Arnold (released in 2023), the actor recalled how the failure of the movie affected him. "When Last Action Hero came out I had reached my peak after Terminator 2, having the most successful movie of the year worldwide, I cannot tell you how upset that I was [about the negative Last Action Hero reviews]. It hurts you. It hurts your feelings. It's embarrassing. I didn't want to see anyone for a week but you keep plodding along." Director James Cameron said that he had called Schwarzenegger the weekend after Last Action Hero opened and recalled that it was the only time he's "ever heard him down." Cameron continued, "He took it as a deep blow to his brand. I think it really shook him."
Shane Black was very critical of the movie: "It was a mess. There was a movie in there, struggling to emerge, which would have pleased me. But what they'd made was a jarring, random collection of scenes."
In the years since the release of Last Action Hero, the film has developed a strong cult following. Schwarzenegger singled out that movie as his most underrated: "Last Action Hero was great – it wasn't fantastic, but it was underrated. Now, more and more people are seeing it and saying, "I love this movie." I'm getting the residual checks, so I know it's true. It made money – that's always an important thing for me. Because it's show business, right?" Later, Charles Dance said: "I think they just didn't time the release very well. It came out more or less at the same time as something very big", referring to Jurassic Park. "But it was fun to do." He also praised Schwarzenegger: "Arnold is a very smart man, oh yes. Very definitely. And very funny, and very aware."
The film was nominated for six Golden Raspberry Awards: Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, Worst New Star (Austin O'Brien), and Worst Original Song ("Big Gun"), but it did not win any. At the 1993 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, the film received two nominations without wins: Worst Picture and Worst Actor (Schwarzenegger). The film was also nominated for seven Saturn Awards for Best Fantasy Film, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Writing, Best Performance by a Young Actor, Best Costume, and Best Special Effects, again winning nothing.
A video game based on the film was released in 1994 on video game consoles, the themed-pinball machine by Data East was included and released on The Pinball Arcade and its spin-off Stern Pinball Arcade in 2016.
In October 2019, Schwarzenegger said that he was open to starring in sequels to Last Action Hero and True Lies (1994) if there was sufficient fan interest.