‘Last Action Hero’: The Little But Important Details You Might Have Missed
Stuck at home? So is ScreenCrush’s Matt Singer — which is why he’s watching things streaming on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney+, YouTube, Criterion, Tubi, and elsewhere, and then writing about what he finds. If you want to suggest something for him to watch and write about, find him on Twitter. Previous installments of this column can be found here.
Today’s Film:
Last Action Hero (1993)
Director: John McTiernan
Writers: Shane Black, David Arnott, Zak Penn, Adam Leff
Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Dance, Austin O‘Brien
Box Office Total: $137.2 million
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 36 percent
Currently Streaming On: Showtime
Why I Watched It: This one wasn’t suggested by a reader, but after watching The Thomas Crown Affair for an earlier installment of this column, and rewatching Predator recently for another assignment, I decided to dive in to a full John McTiernan retrospective by revisiting Last Action Hero for the first in a couple years. Although it was considered a major flop in its day — it notoriously opened a week after Jurassic Park in 1993 and was thoroughly thrashed at the summer box office — retrospective audiences have warmed to the movie. There seems to be a growing consensus that it’s an overlooked gem, rather than a disaster that got what it deserved.
I find I like it more each time I revisit it. So let’s see what this revisit has in store...
Gallery — Extremely Controversial Movies That We Love: