1993 - THE LAST ACTION HERO, Arnold spoofs his films and himself.

 Columbia pictures lured Arnold Schwarzenegger with a big salary to star in a summer movie.  The choice interestingly enough was to make a film poking fun at Arnold's action star image and in a very strange way a tribute to Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr.  

In this film a young boy who is an avid fan of Arnold's screen hero Detective Jack Slater is magically transported into the current Jack Slater sequel he is watching.  Here he is confronted with being a character witnessing every action movie cliche in the book. As the boy tries to persuade Slater that he is really only a character in a movie the audience is treated to a list of cameos and tributes to movies like Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal of all things.

This movie was a big critical and commercial failure.  Critics felt the film never found the right tone for the story and all the bad publicity regarding the difficulties in making the film probably kept the audience away.

The director John McTiernan worked under intense pressure to meet the studio's release date which probably affected the final form of the film.

 

Seen today the film is actually very funny, Arnold was game to make fun of himself and in a way it was almost the pinacle of Arnold's career as his projects got less and less interesting after this film.

The film's listed writers were Shane Black and David Arnott but a number of uncredited writers worked on this film including William Goldman, the running time was 131 minutes.