Last Action Hero released 25 years ago today

I see it as a cool premise...what's the problem? It's just a little Arnold movie...ppl just love to hate it. weird...

 

When I saw it in the theater the week it premiered, the audience I was with literally booed at the end. That doesn't happen frequently. The premise was not that bad; the execution was horrible.

It's fair to say that nowadays, this could be done on green screen and with a lot of visual effects. You can make an argument that recent films like La La Land duplicated a lot of that "Old Hollywood" look, but with modern techniques. Coppola was very much ahead of his time there.

Well, the problem there was that Coppola was sitting in an air-conditioned trailer ("Silverfish") about 200 yards from the studio, and yelling at the actors via an intercom system while watching their performances on large video monitors. What most directors do today is they stand about 20 feet from the actors and just talk to them in a normal tone of voice, and during the scene they watch a monitor that the DP and others can also see. If the director needs to quietly give the actor some changes, he can walk right over and speak to them quietly without any embarrassment or delay.

There were a lot of reasons why Coppola's system failed, but a lot of what he tried to do -- particularly electronic video editing -- was a pretty good idea. In fact, it was Coppola's American Zoetrope Studios that held the patent for decades on certain aspects of digital editing, particularly synchronizing film keykode and electronic timecode numbers, and I can recall seeing that notice come up many times over the years with Evertz, Avid, Premiere, Final Cut Pro, and other kinds of video post software. Coppola made money for years on that invention, even though his own usage of the idea was (at least initially) a disaster.

BTW, I work about 6 blocks from where Coppola shot that movie, less than a mile down Romaine Street (and I'm there now). This is also the same studio that Desilu owned in the 1950s and used for I Love Lucy and many other sitcoms. I went to the Zoetrope auction when they went bankrupt, and all of the props for One from the Heart were there, along with the customized Betamax machines used for editing.

As for Last Action Hero: I kind of agree with the 1993 Daily Variety review, which said in part...

"Last Action Hero" is a joyless, soulless machine of a movie. This $80 million-plus mishmash of fantasy, industry in-jokes, self-referential parody, film-buff gags and too-big action set-pieces will test the clout of a humongous, superstar-driven marketing campaign to put over a picture people won't much like, with the possible exception of early-teen boys. After the big opening, word-of-mouth will likely send B.O. down on a steeper-than-desired slide.

Daily Variety: Last Action Hero review

And that's the same movie I saw. "Joyless and soulless" barely scratches the surface. I would add to that "stupid, nonsensical, with desperate machine-like efforts at comedy that don't work." The comedy ain't funny, the story is stupid, and the action ain't real enough for me. Fantasy is very, very hard to pull off, and this movie is a good example of that.

The director, John McTiernan (who did Die Hard among others) had this to say: "Initially, it was a wonderful Cinderella story with a nine-year-old boy. We had a pretty good script by Bill Goldman, charming. And this ludicrous hype machine got hold of it, and it got buried under bulls***. It was so overwhelmed with baggage. And then it was whipped out unedited, practically assembled right out of the camera. It was in the theater five or six weeks after I finished shooting. It was kamikaze, stupid, no good reason for it. And then to open the week after Jurassic Park--God! To get to the depth of bad judgment involved in that, you'd need a snorkel."

 

I must have been watching a different movie..LOL...I see none of that.

 

Read the reviews. You're looking at it through the haze of 25 years and being a different age. I was an adult when I saw it, and I was horrified by the massive level of stupidity and arrogance that it took to make a movie this bad. It's not just a little bad... it's unbelievably bad.

Wikipedia covers it pretty well, if you want to ignore my point of view and consider a third party's opinion:

Last Action Hero - Wikipedia

We're talking about a movie that was nominated for six "Golden Raspberry" awards for bad cinema, plus an entire chapter was devoted to it in the book Hit and Run about Guber & Peters taking over Columbia Pictures for Sony; the chapter was called "How They Built the Bomb," so consider that. The book Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops also goes into it pretty well.

 

It's funny how the majority of the folks in this thread either like the film, remember liking the film, or rewatched the film and enjoyed the film.
You're the one trying to convince us how bad it is.

Different tastes man. The audience isn't always privy to inside info, business antics, and taking in every review as scripture.

Sometimes, people just enjoy things for what they are. Camp.

Speaking of other camp that is enjoyed.

 

"Know what I mean, Vern?"

RIP Jim Varney

 

Show me a published review from a mainstream critic that says it's a good movie. I've posted a link to two dozen bad reviews (from Roger Ebert, the NY Times, the LA Times, Daily Variety, and many others). Bear in mind there's always the possibility you're wrong. I think the weight of evidence is more on my side; even Arnold admits there were very good reasons why it bombed. This is not a movie that got mixed reviews. 34 on Rotten Tomatoes... come on.

Empire magazine has a thoughtful (recent) 2015 article on the movie that I thought went into a lot of detail about why the studio thought the movie was a surefire thing, and why all the ingredients for success seemed to be there, at least on the surface. They look back on the movie through modern eyes, and I think if you take a step back and look at the movie objectively, you'll see what they're saying. Screenwriter Shane Black in particular has some insightful comments.

The Life And Death Of Last Action Hero

 

Bad movie or not, I enjoyed this film. It appeals to me for the same reasons that the Crank movies do. Plus, I've always had a soft spot for Arnold. I've owned it on LD, DVD and Blu over the years.

Then again, one of my favorite movies of all time is Zardoz so what do I know?

 

I really like this movie, had the original VHS back when it came out, got the Blu-ray later on. My only issue with the Blu-ray is that it only has 448kbps Dolby Digital 5.1. Good enough, but with Blu-ray I would have expected lossless. And I thought the movie was originally done in SDDS 8-channel audio, so surprised there was never a release with 7.1 audio on it. It's a "Mill Creek" Blu-ray and I've heard people complain about them so maybe I just own a crappy release. A nice AVC-encoded 4k remastered Blu-ray would be nice.

 

I was speaking in the context of this thread.
I think one other guy agrees with you.

I’m wrong all of the time. I thought Rogue One was a foreign knock off of Star Wars (especially when the score starts to sound like John Williams, then changes by 4 different notes), yet every person I talk about with, loves it.

I also think that Shape Of Water is embarrassing to be considered Best Picture.

But I also love Copkiller/Corrupt/The Order Of Death, soooo I’m not legitimately allowed to judge films...

But Last Action Hero, even years later, seems to work for me, and the majority of people posting in this thread.

 

When did you first see this movie?

Opening weekend. I was 15 going on 16.

What did you think?

Meh. Ain't no T2.

Has this opinion changed?

No, because I never saw it a second time.

Do you or did you own it on some home video format (VHS, laserdisc, DVD, BluRay)?

No, but I am interested in seeing it again to reappraise now that I'm old and desperate for escape.

 

Indeed...big fan of Jim Varney...wonderful soul who left us too soon.

 

and I'll bet you'll enjoy it...: )

 

that's funny...like it would matter to an individual who can decide for themselves what the care to watch...how many movies did you miss due to a critics pen? Me? NONE...the more they hate them the more I love them...

 

Ah.

 

never heard of that one?

 

Saying all the critics must be wrong is a little bit like screaming "fake news!", don't you think?

Read the links that I posted before condemning my opinion.

 

No, the critic...you are entitled to your opinion...you are not a critic so your opinion doesn't condemn a movie to masses, yes? also you are condemning mine and others opinions who enjoy the movie, yes?

 

Wasn't this movie one of the first ones done with SDDS in 8 channel?

 

Yes, it was the first movie with the (now defunct) Sony Digital Dynamic Sound System, which I believe was the first 8-channel cinema system. I know engineers who felt that SDDS actually had better sound quality for its time than Dolby, though others felt that Cinema Digital Sound was better still. There was lots of "sound confusion" going on in theaters in the 1990s.

 

I saw it in a second-run theater in my hometown.

I thought it was an interesting concept that was spectacularly poorly executed.

I've had no desire to see it again.

Or to buy a copy.

 

Why no DTS-HD MA audio track on the Blu-ray? I feel like 448kbps DD 5.1 on the Blu-ray is kind of a waste. Maybe the Mill Creek release I own is just kind of crappy.

 

That's right! Tell him what he's won, Don.

 

Watched it again. Still liked it.

Liked the anamorphic cinematography a lot.

 

this one never gets old...for me.