Last Action Hero 2007 Horror Movie Reviews

Remember the panning intro into the movie theatre? Remember the forlorn-looking gent with the smoke dangling out of his mouth attending the concession counter? Same dude behind the security desk at Cyberdyne. Abdul Salaam El Razzac. Not even IMDb has him credited. That's the first moment you know here comes Schwarzenegger's Sgt. Pepper. With all the same faults and virtues. Some call Last Action Hero Schwarzenegger's BIG mistake. And like Sgt. Pepper, it has its corollary inspiration, its movie version of Pet Sounds. Remember Altman's The Player? Came out a just a year prior to Last Action Hero. If you recall how the movie-inside-the-movie concluded The Player, what a cheap satisfying laugh, it's kinda the starting point to this flick. Just substitute Jack Slater for Bruce Willis, add AC/DC and a few thousand more miracles, many of them car stunts, and presto, a way funner movie. Deconstruction for the masses, ahead of its time, underrated ~ or maybe it's just a movie version of its own Mad magazine spoof. Some jokes land squarely on the jaw, others miss, but they sure keep coming. There's a lot of lurking visual puns and some of them are maybe mistakes. Not necessarily BIG mistakes. (Professor Toru Tanaka, last time around seen as Subzero "now plain zero," apparently makes the transition into the real world just to pointlessly vanish in a cab. Hello?) Truth in advertising: I'll teach you to be vulnerable, you'll teach me to be brave. Maybe Austin O'Brien didn't click and maybe the ending simply lacked a fitting last blast. Hey, even True Lies felt like it was 15 minutes too long. I can live with that. On the red carpet, Schwarzenegger says there's only 48 dead bodies in Slater IV but, hey, I read on the Kaboom site there's 45 in Last Action Hero. We're missing three. Or are we supposed to believe there's some sorta distorted difference between Slater IV and Last Action Hero? (Even Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band featured the Beatles in the audience.) Wouldn't want to nitpick, right Danny? This was the first Schwarzenegger film I saw. (Oddly, it's the kitchen 'real world' scene with the Mozart music, I remembered most vividly. The lighting is actually otherworldly.) Like many people, by the end of the Hamlet sequence, I was sold. And Schwarzenegger might BE the last action hero, too; no way am I gonna accept Nicolas Cage or Matt Damon. Last Action Hero is not my favorite Schwarzenegger movie anymore but what a great introduction to his career. Or maybe the career he intended. (He might be back. Wouldn't Schwarzenegger make a great Rearden or Galt if Atlas Shrugged ever gets made?) Just like Sgt. Pepper, Last Action Hero cotton candy vaudville for the mind, as another reviewer wrote, accurately. Come to think of it, Sgt. Pepper was my 1st Beatles album.