Last Action Hero (1993) !!HOT!!
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. Penn himself noted that the studio ironically then had Black rewrite the script.[9] 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, Penn and Leff were eventually credited with the story of the film, but not the screenplay.
Last Action Hero (1993)
If you've never seen Last Action Hero, the plot is relatively straightforward: Action-movie superfan Danny Madigan (Austin O'Brien) escapes his not-so-great childhood reality by spending all of his free time at a rundown movie theater. His go-to franchise is the trilogy starring Schwarzenegger's epic action hero Jack Slater. So imagine Madigan's delight when the theater's projectionist gifts him a magic ticket that grants him transport into the latest movie, Jack Slater IV. Everything's great in the movie-verse since the star of the action flick can't be killed and Danny gets to tag along for the fun, even if he's the slightly more vulnerable comedic sidekick. But the fun's over once the movie's villain gets ahold of the ticket and uses it to transport himself, and other villains from movie history, into the real world, causing havoc. The only ones who can stop him are a very mortal Slater and the returned Danny Madigan, who has to help his movie star pal navigate the real world and its life-threatening perils.
As an action movie alone, Last Action Hero is serviceable. As a movie for fans who spent the 80s and early 90s devouring every available action movie out there, it's downright hilarious. John McTiernan pulls no punches right out of the gate as the standoff against The Ripper, who's holding a rooftop full of children hostage and keeping a full battallion of cops at bay, occurs during Christmas, just like another famous McTiernan-directed, Shane Black-scripted film you might have heard of. That's just one nod to a litany of action-movie tropes skewered by the script and McTiernan's direction: Hero cop survives everything that's thrown at him while mere mortal cops die "two days before retirement", an extremely loose understanding and application of physics, improbable gun-play that always falls in the hero's favor, and one-liners that would be DOA in any other genre. (It's also probably the only time you'll get to see Schwarzenegger play Shakespeare, though he does it with 80s/90s-flavored, machine gun-toting, cigar-smoking flair.) It's wish fulfillment at its most imaginative and its strangest: The scene in which Danny's apartment is burglarized and he's handcuffed to the sink by a knife-wielding tweaker at first seems like another fantasy playing out in his mind, but it's an example of the cruel reality of his childhood in a rough New York neighborhood, and a bit of foreshadowing for events to come.
A side plot that's lost in all the gunfire and explosions is the theater itself, an old-fashioned and once-gorgeous entertainment venue that famously featured the legendary Harry Houdini--the source of the magic ticket, handed down by Nick (the late, great Robert Prosky), that transports Danny into the movies--that has fallen on hard times. Its ornate design, decorative lighting, lush wall-to-wall carpet and plush seating has all fallen into disrepair; it's now threadbare, covered in graffiti, and on its last legs. A sign outside promises a new multiplex Loews theater coming to the location soon. As big-budget action films and their audiences demand bigger, louder, and more technologically advanced movie theaters, the traditional theatre with the personal touch has gone the way of the dinosaur; 25 years of hindsight have shown this prediction to be mostly on point, save the relative handful of indie theaters around the world showing niche cinematic selections.
While the first act of Last Action Hero is an interesting enough commentary on the state of action films and the movie theater industry itself in post-80s America, the meta movie really amps up once Danny's transported into the insane Slater-verse itself. The second act spends time in Jack Slater IV and enjoys all of the typical tropes you'd expect in a blockbuster action film; this is where the bulk of the comedy and over-the-top fun comes in. But it's in the third act, which drags Danny and Slater back into the real world, where the action hero is distressed to find that his usual heroics don't pan out so well for him. The realization that he is in fact an action-movie hero lends some vulnerability to the previously bulletproof star, giving his final confrontations with not one but two villains and his own mortality some surprisingly grounded stakes. It all ends happily ever after, of course, which is both a testament to the uplifting power of film as an escape from the real world and as a nod to the trope of everything always working out for the hero in the end.
Benedict, on the other hand, functions as both an antagonist and a corrupted sort of fanboy in this movie. He picks at his boss' mangled metaphors and incorrect phrasing throughout the film, sniping at every little detail. He has to have everything his way, and if he can't, he'll be a real grumbly dick about it. Benedict is sharp, unflinching, and unforgiving, saying that, "If God was a villain ... he'd be me." So when he gets his hands on that golden ticket, it's not long before he figures out the rules of the real world, rules that let him become his own kingpin and crime boss without any accountability, like an invasive species taking over a defenseless land. He'll do anything he can to disrupt Slater's story to the point that he'll not only bring in classic villains from film history to sow chaos, but he'll also use the action hero's own tropes against him, like leaving an empty chamber in a revolver only to make Slater think he'd run out of ammo. What Benedict doesn't account for, however, is the self-sacrifice of good-hearted film fan boy, Danny Madigan. The subtext here is that movies are entertainment and art, and should be enjoyed as such, but the divide between the fiction and the real is an important distinction to maintain despite the tendency to blur them.
The movie's disappointing box-office result has often been contributed to the fact that the fans of Arnold Schwarzenegger did not appreciate their hero effectively spoofing himself, as well as the action genre that had made him great. However, time apparently seems to have made audiences much kinder to this movie and its type of self-aware humor. Schwarzenegger's next movie, True Lies (1994), which had a more subtle form of self-parody, did much better critically and financially, as did The Expendables (2010), The Expendables 2 (2012), and The Expendables 3 (2014), where Schwarzenegger parodied some of his famous trademarks. In fact, characters becoming aware of their own movie conventions became a big thing in the Scream (1996) franchise, and Danny's observation that villains often make the mistake of laying out their entire plan in a lengthy monologue was effectively re-used in The Incredibles (2004).
One scene of the film involves police officers being partnered up with strange partners, in a parody of buddy cop films. A live-action female police officer is partnered with Officer Whiskers (played by Danny DeVito) , an animated cat. This was similar to the premise of the animated television series "Bonkers" (1993-1994), where "real-world" police officer Miranda Wright was partnered with cartoon character Bonkers D. Bobcat.
Danny is obsessed with a fictional movie character action hero Jack Slater. When a magical ticket transports him into Jack's latest adventure, Danny finds himself in a world where movie magic and reality collide. Now it's up to Danny to save the life of his hero and new friend.
Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as himself and also fictional action hero, L.A. cop Jack Slater. When a teenage boy (Austin O'Brien) finds himself transported to Jack's fictional world, the duo must stop a ruthless assassin, now free in the real-world.
Young Danny Madigan is a big fan of Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a larger-than-life action hero. When his best friend, Nick the projectionist, gives him a magic ticket to the new Jack Slater film, Danny is transported into Slater's world, where the good guys always win. One of Slater's enemies, Benedict the hitman, gets hold of the ticket and ends up in Danny's world, where he realises that if he can kill Schwarzenegger, Slater will be no more. Slater and Danny must travel back and stop him. 041b061a72