Arnie Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero is a more intelligent, fun and intriguing movie than people give it credit for. In the 1993 fantasy, action-comedy blockbuster, the titular Arnie plays Los Angeles cop, Jack Slater. Not in the movie itself, but the movie franchise showcased within Last Action Hero that teenager, Danny Madigan, is particularly enamoured with watching at the cinema to escape his humdrum existence.
Arnie plays himself in the 'real' world of New York City where Danny also resides with his harried, single-parent, widowed mother, Irene. Both realities collide when projectionist, Nick, gifts Danny a golden ticket stub that inserts him into Jack's far more sensational, celluloid life. Danny thereon takes it upon himself to awaken his new cop-buddy to the alien concept that he's living in a fictional, Hollywood fabrication, whilst assisting him in bringing to task Jack's main antagonist, Vivaldi, his sinister henchman, Mr Benedict, and a rain-mac-cloaked 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' style psychopath known as the 'Ripper'. As long as the independent, disparate worlds remain such, the situation is manageable, the real world safe from despicable movie villains. What complicates matters is Benedict discovering the mystical power of the golden ticket and exploiting it to transport himself across the boundary between fact and fiction.
Fundamentally Last Action Hero is a tongue-in-cheek satirical parody of the action movie genre and stereotypical, muscle-bound heroes such as Arnie himself, Sly, Chuck Norris, Jean Claud Van Damme and so on. Bursting with knowing winks and astute observations, it's refreshing to see that Arnie is sufficiently self-effacing to mock himself and the glittering career that built his legacy.
A major disappointment then that the accompanying Amiga game developed by Dome Software and published by Psygnosis is such an embarrassing joke. It's a 2D, side-scrolling brawler in the vein of Final Fight, though otherwise has no redeeming features. An uneventful, button-bashing affair that can be beaten with your eyes shut, assuming we don't doze off in the meantime. Arnie must tackle armed combatants with no weapons, at the insistence of Columbia Pictures who, ironically, were concerned about his status as a role model for children.
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