How They Built The Bomb

On June 18, 1993, one of the most infamous movie bombs premiered. Last Action Hero had everything going for it. It was an Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie. It was being released during the summer. It had a lot of hype surrounding it. And that was the problem. There had been issues with the hype before the movie premiered. Word spread that scenes were having to be reshot or re-edited well into May of that year. When a colossal and inflatable Schwarzenegger (or Hero’s Jack Slater) was erected in New York City, it was after the World Trade Center bombing and many people took offense to a piece of dynamite being held one of the hands. That was changed to a police badge. An Entertainment Weekly article on the movie more or less hinted to the movie being a disaster as it focused on the negative buzz surrounded it. But when the movie premiered, there was still hope. Until the receipts came in. It didn’t help that the movie was released the week after Jurassic Park, even though Park’s opening had been moved up from July to June. It also didn’t help that one major theater reportedly sold out on one screening of Park and then decided to screen Park in another theater where Hero was supposed to show. Apparently, Hero was playing on two screens but they hadn’t sold tickets for that second screen, so they used both tickets and a screen to show a print of Park, leading people to believe when they showed up that Hero had been sold out. Whether this is true or not, it shows that there was a force out to stop the movie from being successful. But Hero isn’t that bad, it’s just not that good. In a pre-Michael Bay era, Hero may have been terrible, but today, despite the negative reviews, it still would have grossed about $200 million. The plot tells the story of a young boy, probably aged 12-14, named Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien), who loves the movies of Jack Slater and we presume Schwarzenegger. Danny is a fan of action movies or all movies, we’re never really sure. He skips school to watch movies. His only friend is Nick (Robert Profsky), an aging projectionist, at a run-down movie theater in New York City. Nick tells Danny that the theater, which is going to be shut down, is going to be showing an advanced print of Jack Slater IV. Why if it’s going to be shut down, we never know. Nick also presents Danny with a ticket given to him by Harry Houdini. Rather than hand it to him, he tears off half and makes it like it’s an actual ticket. This is a McGuffin for a plot point that happens later in the movie. The ticket has magical powers as Danny finds himself inside the movie. At this point, you’d think Danny would marvel in the fact that he’s in an action movie. But that isn’t the case. Danny and Slater seem to argue for the first hour or so about whether they are in a movie or not, which is terrible, because there is a nice parody of high-speed chases following a overblown (no pun intended) explosion that has the aging black police officer to say, “Just two days from retirement” before dying. The chase sequence is loaded with a lot of over the top cliches that would later permeate action movies. A car drives off a bridge, breaking the guardrail and landing on a moving truck trailer and then onto the ground, even though, this vehicle would have been very damaged if not operational. This was also the case in A Good Day to Die Hard, except here it's for exaggeration. Slater fires a Desert Eagle repeatedly without reloading, even though Eagles only have space for about seven bullets in the magazine. A bad guy with dynamite goes flying into an ice-cream truck and explodes with a frozen ice-cream cone hitting another bad guy in the back of the head, killing him too as Slater badly quips, “Iced that guy. Coned the phrase.” There is a lot of great satire happening within the first hour. There’s the stunt casting of Tina Turner as the mayor of Los Angeles, Anthony Quinn as a Mafia boss, F. Murray Abraham as the friend who ends up being the betrayer, Art Carney as the aging veteran actor who also dies in the first reel setting up the rest of the movie. Then you have Charles Dance playing the Eurotrash villain, a madman named Benedict with glass eyes he keeps changing and he’s a excellent marksman with a gun. Unfortunately, none of this is enough to carry the film, because the filmmakers don’t know what is going on. The problem is that even though Schwarzenegger is the star, he’s the sidekick. This is Danny’s story and Danny's story is boring. There's a reference to him having no friends but Nick. But then again, he gains no other friends at the end. Also, Danny never has the moment of clarity where he learns to live in the real world and not the fake world. There's a nice small role by Mercedes Ruehl that makes us wish we had more of her flirting with Slater. Unfortunately, she is only in three scenes and that's it. Schwarzenegger and O’Brien have little chemistry together because O’Brien is too cocky and Slater is too arrogant. In the second hour, Danny and Slater go back to New York City in the real world. Then, the movie seems to parody more of Hollywood with cameos by famous people and the movie continues to portray Danny and Slater bickering. I think the filmmakers intended for the movie to be a buddy film, but in the end, it turns out more like being stuck in a room with an arguing couple and you're unable to do say anything. You just have two options: Either get up and walk out or stay and wait for it to end. Hero’s biggest problem was that the Hollywood machine couldn’t keep it from becoming what it was. Originally penned as a satire by college buddies Zak Penn and Adam Leff of the movies being made by writer Shane Black and director John McTiernan, the script was bought and rewritten by Black and directed McTiernan. Also, the casting of Schwarzenegger was meant to be self-parody, but it fails. We never get to see who Jack Slater really is. Slater wears the faded blue jeans, the alligator boots, the red shirt, the brown leather jacket, but it's just an appearance rather than a performance. After roles in Total Recall and Terminator 2: Judgment Day where Schwarzenegger was allowed to do some acting, he basically phones it in as Slater. Instead, the premiere scenes of Schwarzenegger are what stand out. We see him getting out of a Hummer and talking with his then-wife Maria Shriver, who obviously looks annoyed to be there, and that's funny. Some of the best scenes are the in-joke cameos of Jim Belushi, Schwarzenegger’s costar in Red Heat, and Jean-Claude Van Damme, who briefly worked on Predator before leaving. There is the great scene of Tom Noonan as Tom Noonan looking like a normal guy, even though he is playing the murderous Ripper. The biggest part of Hero was that it didn’t know what it wanted to be, a parody, a satire, an action movie, or buddy movie. Unfortunately, it only partially works as an action movie and parody. Still, the harsh criticism heaped upon the movie when it was released was unjust. Entertainment Weekly called it the worst movie of 1993 and even mentioned the movie's weak box office return. Many people viewed it as the turning point in Schwarzenegger’s career, where he was no longer profitable. No, that was Batman and Robin. Schwarzenegger still found success in movies like Eraser, True Lies, which was what Hero tried to be, and even Jingle All the Way. Hero was basically the end of Schwarzenegger’s “I’ll be back” line as it wasn’t said in any movies after for a while. Hero actually helped breathe new life into the action film genre that would later be prevalent in the 1990s. Looking at Hero, you can see the beginnings of Speed, Bad Boys, The Rock and Con Air emerging. Con Air would have more meta in-jokes than Hero. Looking at the movies Schwarzenegger has made since returning to movies after a brief career as the Governator of California, you have to ask yourself, was Hero really that bad?