The Last Action Hero

Comedy, Adventure, Fantasy, Action

Arnold Schwarzenegger	Jack Slater / Himself
Austin O'Brien	Danny Madigan
F. Murray Abraham	John Practice
Art Carney	Nick
Charles Dance	Benedict
Frank McRae	Lieutenant Dekker
Tom Noonan	Ripper
Robert Prosky	Frank
Anthony Quinn	Tony Vivaldi
Mercedes Ruehl	Irene Madigan

Director	John McTiernan
Producer	John McTiernan; Steve Roth
Writer	Zak Penn; Shane Black
Cinematography	Dean Semler
Musician	Michael Kamen

Jack Slater is an action-film hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. An old projectionist (Robert Prosky) hands a magic movie ticket to Jack's biggest preteen fan (Austin O'Brien), and the kid steps right inside the latest Jack Slater film, becoming the actor star's sidekick in gunfights and car chases. But when Jack's nemesis (Charles Dance) gets his hands on the ticket, the fight busts out into the real world and Jack (à la Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear) refuses to believe he's a fictional character. Director John McTiernan churns some nifty scenes out of this setup, although the fiction-to-reality shuffle is not as deft as in, say, Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the plot needs the kind of logic and discipline found in that classic when-worlds-collide film Back to the Future. Still, Schwarzenegger has moments of wit and smashing action, and we get a faux-movie trailer advertising an intriguing new shoot-'em-up: "Something's rotten in the State of Denmark--and Hamlet is taking out the trash!"