You’re going to play chicken, aren’t you. Just like Jack Slater! New York City. Ten-year-old Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien)lives in a crime-ridden area of the city with his widowed mother, Irene (Mercedes Ruehl). Since his father’s death, Danny takes comfort in watching action movies, especially a series featuring Los Angeles cop Jack Slater at a cinema owned by Nick (Robert Prosky), who is also the projectionist. Nick gives Danny a golden ticket once owned by Harry Houdini, to see an early screening of Jack Slater IV before its official release. During the film, the ticket stub (counterfoil) transports Danny into the fictional world, interrupting Slater during a car chase following the murder of his favourite Slater cousin (Art Carney). After escaping from their pursuers, Slater takes Danny to the LAPD headquarters, where Danny points out evidence of the fictional nature of Slater’s world, such as the presence of numerous attractive women (even working at the counter in the video store) and a cartoon cat detective named Whiskers. Danny says Slater’s friend John Practice (F. Murray Abraham) should not be trusted as he killed Mozart (as he is played by the actor who played Salieri in Amadeus). Though Slater dismisses all of this as part of Danny’s wild imagination, Slater’s shouty supervisor, Lieutenant Dekker (Frank McRae) assigns Danny as his new partner and instructs them to investigate criminal activities related to mafia boss Tony Vivaldi (Anthony Quinn). Danny guides Slater to Vivaldi’s mansion, recognising its location from the start of the movie. There, they meet Vivaldi’s henchman, Mr. Benedict (Charles Dance) albeit he claims never to have risen above the position of lackey. Vivaldi and Benedict killed Slater’s second cousin but Slater has no evidence and is forced to leave with Danny; however, Benedict is curious as to how Danny knew and he and several hired guns follow Slater and Danny back to Slater’s home. There, Slater, his daughter Whitney (Bridgette Wilson) and Danny thwart the attack, though Benedict ends up getting the ticket stub. He discovers it can transport him out of the film and into the real world. Slater deduces Vivaldi’s plan to murder the Torelli mob by releasing a lethal gas during a funeral atop a skyscraper. He and Danny go to stop it, but are waylaid by Practice, who reveals that Danny was right: he is working for Vivaldi. Whiskers kills Practice, saving Slater and Danny, who manage to prevent any deaths from the gas release. After Vivaldi’s plan fails, Benedict kills him and uses the stub to escape into the real world, pursued by Slater and Danny. I’ve never met a fictional character before. Slater becomes despondent upon learning the truth, as well as his mortality in the real world but cheers up after spending time with Irene. Meanwhile, Benedict devises a plan to kill the actor portraying Slater in the movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger (attending with his wife, TV journalist Maria Shriver), using the villain Ripper (Tom Noonan, who’s also attending the movie as himself), bring other movie villains into the real world and take over … I’m in the movie! Holy cow, I’m in the movie! Loud, meta, self-referential, this could only be an 80s action movie. Except it’s a 90s satire of the action movie made by the duo who made the 80s action movie – star der Ahnuldt and partner in crime director John McTiernan who made him a megastar with quintessential 80s sci-fi actioner Predator. With a screenplay by Shane Black & David Arnott from a story by Zak Penn & Adam Leff, this in essence is the dream team and of course it’s set in Los Angeles at Christmas. There are problems however. Oh shit! I’m a comedy sidekick! It’s not going to work! A famous flop, this grossed $15M against a production budget of $85M a year after Arnold Schwarzenegger had his biggest ever hit, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Part of the reason this celebration of movies and of Schwarzenegger’s cultural persona and movie iconicity doesn’t entirely resonate is probably the character played by O’Brien. He’s not obnoxious exactly but he’s far too knowing and while that may have looked good on the page and plays to the postmodernist conceit at work from the first frame there is an empathy quotient that’s missing – crucially, we know everything is all going to be alright. This, despite the opening sequence when in the first film within the film Slater’s son is involved in a terrible dilemma for his father, a hostage drama which we later discover transpires to have had a fatal outcome. This gives the characters a kind of equality but because the kid knows more than the adult Slater is always a beat behind. That golden ticket suggests a Wonka-esque outcome that never quite plays out: the stakes are never raised despite the evident danger. You’re the best celebrity lookalike I’ve ever seen, says Schwarzenegger to Slater at the movie premiere which precipitates the climax and brings real and reel life together in cataclysmic fashion. With a boss who shouts all the time, a British villain, a mom who works late and a dead dad, a dead kid, a treacherous colleague and the promise of hoodlums running the world, not to mention a nod to Bergman (Ingmar, we hasten to mention) with Ian McKellen as Death, and a host of stars playing either themselves or their cinematic incarnations (Sharon Stone shows up in a walkthrough as Catherine Trammell from Basic Instinct) this muscular workout may have taken all the genre tropes and a leaf from Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo but goes somewhere different and is not at all satisfactory. It’s a messy headscratching Rorschach blot of a film. We blame the writers, who clearly struggled with the tone and structure. Is this what all cinema is leading us to? Hollywood is writing our lives
mondomovies 