Last Action Hero was released twenty years ago today, just one weekend after Spielberg's Jurassic Park broke box-office records and all but guaranteed empty seats for Schwarzenegger's latest. The film, an action-comedy directed by John McTiernan and aimed at kids but satirizing buddy flicks made for adults, was received by critics at the time with both bafflement and scorn, and its only enduring legacy is as a rare bomb for its star and director. But looking back now, it's clear that Last Action Hero is a much smarter and savvier sendup than people gave it credit for in 1993. And so, in honor of its twenty-year anniversary — and because unlike its main competitor, we're not likely to see this re-released in 3-D anytime soon — it's well worth rediscovering the charm and wit that makes McTiernan's light-touch blockbuster so special.

The setup is simple enough, amounting to little more than a jokey adolescent riff on Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo: A wide-eyed moppet named Danny (Austin O'Brien) finds himself magically transported into the action of his favorite film franchise, a buddy-cop Schwarzenegger vehicle called Jack Slater, where he struggles in vain to convince the eponymous hero that they're stuck in a fictional world. For much of the movie's running time, things proceed as the gimmick dictates: Stars make punchline cameos, Schwarzenegger exaggerates his own nigh-mythical persona to super-comic effect, and Danny seeks tirelessly to prove that all the world is literally a stage. The gags that result are predictable, at least conceptually, but the details have been finely calibrated by screenwriter Shane Black — yes, that Shane Black, who before directing Iron Man 3 had basically invented the buddy-action comedy with his scripts for Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout.

In 1993, few screenwriters understood the conventions of the summer blockbuster as intimately as Black, the form's most vaunted purveyor, and it's this expertise that makes Last Action Hero such a pitch-perfect genre caricature. It may be intended for young children — at least insofar as its protagonist is one — but the film in so rich in classic Hollywood (and R-rated) reference points, from Amadeus to Basic Instinct and Bergman's The Seventh Seal, that adults well-versed in cinema history may be the audience most inclined to savor its appeal.

And even better is the film's conception of movie morality, which it twists into a biting satirical treatise: Rather than suggest, once the fictional characters break free into the real world, that reality has rules and consequences that the film world doesn't, Last Action Hero does just the opposite, serving up hard truths about the uncaring streets of modern-day New York. "In this world," observes a villain named Benedict (Charles Dance), "bad guys can win" — a point he summarily proves by shooting a local mechanic in cold blood, loudly announcing the murder and looking disappointed when he hears no screams or sirens. Last Action Hero suggests that while the movies may seem like heedless spectacles, it's the moral chaos of our own world that's really dire. That's quite a thesis for a comedy made for kids.

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