Alan/ Patricia: Last Action Hero either needed to be directed by the dude who wrote it so that it would have some cohesion of vision and tone, or spent another several years in development. The approach here is “kitchen sink” in terms of just throwing stuff out there to see what would work, but I agree with you that there is a lot of compelling, even mind blowing content beneath the surface of this movie. I dig that both of you enjoyed it.

Jim: I remember going on a group date to see Last Action Hero with one of my first girlfriends. Yeah, not a flick that provokes any romantic activity whatsoever, but me and my buddy who hates Hollywood bullshit had a few laughs during the running time. Ah, the early ’90s. To see a movie in a theater and not hear or see a cell phone. Thanks for commenting!

Jennifer: I’m pretty sure you’re not a spammer. If you are, you’re the most studious, respectful spammer I’ve ever run into and you have thus earned a reprieve from spam comment Phantom Zone. Thanks for dropping by!

Amanda: I think you of all people would appreciate the genre deconstruction going on in Last Action Hero, and as others here like Alan have eluded to, its wacko, bizarre undercurrent. I guess you can tell I recommend giving this a second look.

Megan: You just made me realize that Gary Ross took this same concept and wrote a much more compelling and funny movie called Pleasantville. There may have been 400 variations on this theme, but I feel like Black-Arnott only explored 6 of them here. Thank you for commenting.

Peter: Thanks for reminding me what a wealth of info you can get at Arclight Q & A’s. I wonder if they frown on audience members tape recording those. At any rate, the Penn & Leff session sounded like a blast. Film students would learn a lot more watching Last Action Hero and hearing what went wrong than I think they would watching Citizen Kane. Thanks for commenting!

I attended the first show in Westwood which was also the debut of the much-heralded “SDDS” format. When the ambulance crashes into the theater at the end, the main speaker blew. For the next few minutes, including all of McKellan’s appearance, every line of dialogue was inaudible. The really funny thing about this was that it was tough at first to tell that this wasn’t really part of the movie.

Back in ‘03 the film was screened at the Arclight and Penn & Leff were there for a post-film discussion. To say they held nothing back is putting it mildly. They described in detail what happened during development and production, breaking down everything that went wrong with it but to their credit they never claimed they had the solutions to all the problems. They saved their worst comments for McTiernan & Black. I’d go into more detail, but it’s been a few years by now. I wish somebody would have taped that.

I did not know all that about the screenplay and the editing. I agree more work would have helped this film immensely.

Thanks
Jennifer

Glad to read that you appreciate my comments when I get around to it. Now that you can, I would love to have some comments from you on my new blog — although I’m the first to admit that a lot of what I write about are films that you and probably most critics have not seen or would not choose to see. Ah well…

I also always thought the bit where the real Arnold confronts Jack Slater and yells “You’ve ruined my life!” seemed, as you suggest Black and Arnott believed, like a whole entire movie unto itself.