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Last Action Hero
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Last Action Hero is a 1993 action comedy film directed by John McTiernan. The film is a satire of the action genre and its clichés. The film includes within it several parodies of action films, in the form of films within the film.
The film tells the story of Danny, a young boy who likes action movies, particularly those featuring action hero Jack Slater. It is established within the film that Slater is portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who plays himself as well as portraying Slater.
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Encyclopedia
Last Action Hero is a 1993 action comedy film directed by John McTiernan. The film is a satire of the action genre and its clichés. The film includes within it several parodies of action films, in the form of films within the film.
The film tells the story of Danny, a young boy who likes action movies, particularly those featuring action hero Jack Slater. It is established within the film that Slater is portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who plays himself as well as portraying Slater. Thanks to a "magic ticket", the lines between reality and the movie world blur as Danny is catapulted into Jack Slater IV. The film was released on June 18, 1993 by Columbia Pictures.
Plot
Danny Madigan (Austin O'Brien), is a boy whose love of action movies (especially those of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is played by himself) keeps him out of school and in trouble. His favorite movie franchise is the fictional Jack Slater series, which is preparing for the release of its fourth installment.
On the day before the premier of Jack Slater IV, Danny visits his friend Nick, an old man who runs a run-down movie theater in downtown New York City. He offers Danny a private screening of the film, an offer which Danny is quick to accept, especially when Nick offers him a gold-plated ticket which he claims was given to him by Harry Houdini.
Several minutes into the movie, the stub of the ticket begins to glow blue, and suddenly some dynamite thrown from within the movie lands in the theater, putting Danny into shock. Before he can escape, the dynamite explodes, and Danny vanishes.
Confused, Danny awakens in a moving vehicle, which he quickly discovers is driven by his "action hero", Jack Slater. He soon realizes that he was somehow transported into the film, and begs Slater to help him find his way back to the real world. Slater, however, refuses to help, not believing that HIS world is just a movie.
After Danny's attempts to convince Slater of his true nature (including pointing out that Slater is unable to swear even when trying to) repeatedly become unsuccessful, he suddenly recognizes a mansion from the film's introduction, and, knowing that it is where the "bad guys" are, convinces Slater to check it out. The two find Tony Vivaldi, the crime boss advertised as the villain for Jack Slater IV, and his English henchman Mr. Benedict (Charles Dance). Benedict overhears Danny discussing his knowledge of Benedict's role in the movie, and like Slater, not understanding he himself is in a movie is intrigued to find out how Danny could come about such information.
Benedict double-crosses Vivaldi, killing him, and awaits Slater's arrival at the mansion. When Slater arrives with Danny, Benedict manages to obtain the ticket stub which Danny still has, and vanishes into the real world before Slater's eyes. Puzzled, Slater follows Danny back through the portal into the real world, where the battle continues.
Both Slater and Benedict become acquainted with the nature of the real world; Slater, with the help of Danny's mother, realizes that there are more important things in the world than action, and decides that he would not return to the world that he considers a lie. Meanwhile, Benedict continues with his evil ways, especially when realizing that in the real world it is possible for the "bad guys" to win, and hatches a plan to kill Arnold Schwarzenegger at the premier of Jack Slater IV, thereby causing Jack Slater to cease to exist. Discovering this plan, Danny convinces Slater to go with him to the premier. There, Slater encounters "The Ripper", the villain from Jack Slater III. Slater kills the Ripper by electrocuting him, but is fatally shot in the chest by Benedict, a very unfamiliar concept in the film world. Benedict has now begun to plan world domination, but Slater gets Benedict's gun, and shoots him in the eye, causing the bomb in his glass-eye to detonate, which blows up Benedict and sends the ticket off the roof. The ticket lands in front of a nearby theater, The Seventh Seal is playing and the ticket, in one last use, brings Death into reality. Heading back to the movie theater, they find The Seventh Seals Death, who, before returning to his movie, suggests using the other half of the ticket.
Following Death's advice, Danny returns Slater to the movie, where his fatal injury turns out to be "just a flesh wound". Accepting his reality for what it really is, Slater drives off into the sunlight, renouncing his old ways.
Cast
Cameos
- Franco Columbu, Arnold's friend, roommate, and fellow body builder, makes an indirect cameo appearance as the producer of the new Slater movie in the opening credits.
- Tina Turner makes a cameo appearance at the climax of
Jack Slater III as the mayor of Los Angeles; she tries to convince Slater not to enter a hostage situation. When Danny and Slater arrive at LAPD headquarters, Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick appear outside the front door as Catherine Tramell (from Basic Instinct) and the T-1000 (from Terminator 2: Judgement Day), respectively. Sylvester Stallone makes a cameo, posing as "The Terminator" for a poster promoting Terminator 2; to which Schwarzenegger states "He's a fantastic actor. That's his greatest performance yet". Model/actress Angie Everhart appears as a video store clerk. Danny comments on her as being too attractive to be working at a video store, at which point Jack responds "Yeah, she should be working for us". An animated cat named Whiskers was voiced by an uncredited Danny DeVito. During the premiere of Jack Slater IV in the real world, a number of celebrities make cameo appearances as themselves, including: Maria Shriver (Schwarzenegger's real-life wife), Little Richard, Entertainment Tonight host Leeza Gibbons, James Belushi, Damon Wayans, Chevy Chase, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Timothy Dalton. As Slater and Danny go into the movie theatre to find the real Arnold, MC Hammer asks Slater: "Arnold! The deal is done, right? Slater 5. The soundtrack." Ian McKellen makes a cameo as Death, after a screening of Ingmar Bergman's film, The Seventh Seal comes to life. Before the Hamlet sequence, wherein the Laurence Olivier version is played on a projector, the teacher who introduces the film is Joan Plowright, an English actress and Laurence Olivier's third wife. Noting her students' apparent ignorance of Olivier's storied career, she tells them they may remember him as Zeus in Clash of the Titans, one of Olivier's final roles.
Reception
Last Action Hero was billed at the time as "the next great summer action movie" and many movie insiders predicted the film to be a huge blockbuster, especially following the success of Schwarzenegger's previous film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Instead, the movie was given mixed reviews by critics, only earning a 33% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 44 out of 100 on Metacritic, and grossed $15,338,241 on its opening weekend, for an average of $6,651 from 2,306 theaters, and ended its run with only $50,016,394 in the United States but making an additional $87,202,095 overseas, totaling US$137,298,489 worldwide. In an A&E biography of Schwarzenegger, the actor (who was also the film's executive producer) says that the film could have done even better if not for bad timing, since it came out a week after Jurassic Park, the biggest movie phenomenon of that year. Schwarzenegger states that he tried to persuade his co-producers to postpone the film's June 18 release in the US by four weeks, but they turned a deaf ear on the grounds that the movie would have lost millions of dollars in revenue for every weekend of the summer it ended up missing.
Years after LAH's release, it was the subject of a scathing chapter called "How They Built The Bomb", in the book Hit and Run which detailed misadventures at Sony Pictures in the early-to-mid 1990s. Among the details presented in this chapter were:
- Arnold Schwarzenegger selected LAH as his next project in a close race against another Sony property, a comedy about a modern Tooth Fairy called SWEET TOOTH, which remains unproduced as of 2007.
- Universal moved
Jurassic Park to June 11, 1993 well after Sony had decided on a June 18 release date for LAH.The movie was rumored to be the first advertisement placed on a space-going rocket. As negative reviews came in from pre-screenings, the idea was quickly scrapped.The film was capsized by a wave of negative publicity after a rough cut of it was shown to a preview audience on May Day. Sony then destroyed the test cards and the word-of-mouth proved to be catastrophic for the film.The shooting and editing schedule were so demanding and so smashed against the June 18 release date that after the movie's disaster, a source close to the film said "We shouldn't have had Siskel and Ebert telling us the movie is 10 minutes too long".Sony was even more humiliated the weekend after LAH opened, when the movie A) lost 47% of its opening-weekend audience and B) saw TriStar's Sleepless In Seattle open as the #1 new movie at the box office.The final declared financial loss for the film was $26 million.Last Action Hero was the first film to be released using SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound), but only a few theaters were set up for the new format, and many of those that were experienced technical problems with the new system. Insiders at Paramount reportedly referred to SDDS as "Still doesn't do shit".
Despite this, it gained a strong cult following after its release like Steven Spielberg's Hook.
Background/Production
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. Zak Penn noted himself that it was ironic that the studio then had Shane 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 Zak Penn and Adam Leff were eventually credited with the story of the film but not the screenplay, which is noted as being unusual for a film based on an original screenplay.
There were three prop "Magic Tickets" created by Michael Marcus for the film. The first version was ripped on screen during the movie, the second version was ripped off screen and used later in the production of the movie after the halves of the first ticket were too damaged to be filmed further (these ripped ticket pieces from the first two versions were lost after production), the third version of the Magic Ticket (and only unripped version) was sold on August 20th, 2008 by The Prop Store of London to a private collector in Dallas, Texas (known only as "Mr. X") for a sum of $1,650.00 USD.
Schwarzenegger received a salary of $15 million for his role in the film.
Soundtrack
Music from the Motion Picture album
- "Big Gun" - (AC/DC) – 4:24
- "What the Hell Have I" - (Alice in Chains) – 3:58
- "Angry Again" - (Megadeth) – 3:47
- "Real World" - (Queensr˙che) – 4:21
- "Two Steps Behind" - (Def Leppard) – 4:19
- "Poison My Eyes" - (Anthrax) – 7:04
- "Dream On" - (Aerosmith) – 5:42
- "A Little Bitter" - (Alice in Chains) – 3:53
- "Cock the Hammer" - (Cypress Hill) – 4:11
- "Swim" - (Fishbone) – 4:13
- "Last Action Hero" - (Tesla) – 5:44
- "Jack and the Ripper" - (Michael Kamen & Buckethead) – 3:43
See also
External links
- A positive re-appraisal of the film.
- by Zak Penn and Adam Leff at Awesomefilm
- by Zak Penn and Adam Leff, current draft by Shane Black and David Arnott, doctored by William Goldman at Awesomefilm
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