Last Action Hero

Last Action Hero (1993) is an action film that parodies action films. Danny is a boy who hides in cinemas. His favourite series is the Jack Slater films. One night the projectionist gives him a magic ticket and he falls into the film. He is beside Jack Slater now and is the only person who knows they are in a movie. The idea is to expose the rules. Danny explains them to Slater: the villains always miss, cars explode, you do not die. Slater does not believe him. In the second half the villain takes the ticket into the real world and discovers the rules do not apply: he fires his gun into the air and nobody even looks. Schwarzenegger sends himself up and appears as himself at the premiere of his own film in one scene. The box office story was discussed more than the film. It opened in June 1993, a week after Jurassic Park, and was crushed. Expectations had been enormous, the marketing budget was large, and the result became one of the best known commercial failures of the period. There was even a plan to place an advertisement on a rocket to promote it. John McTiernan directed, having made Die Hard and Predator. It has been reassessed over time and is now regarded as an early example of the genre criticising itself. The child character and the uneven tone are the most common objections. It runs 130 minutes. Good for: action parody, metafiction, and the nineties. Less good for: the tone is uneven, it runs long, and the humour does not always land.