Anatomy of a Scene: Arnold Schwarzenegger does ‘Hamlet’ in ‘Last Action Hero’
As the living embodiment of the musclebound archetypal 1980s action hero who found their star power being gradually eroded as the genre shifted closer and closer towards something approximating a more tangible reality, calling an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie ahead of its time is a rarity.
And yet, it’s entirely applicable to Last Action Hero, which self-reflexively and metatextually picked apart the very genre it occupied long before Wes Craven’s Scream made it cool, and decades before the majority of modern franchise fare made a point of keeping its tongue hovering over the edge of its cheek from start to finish.
John McTiernan’s blockbuster may have been killed by its overconfidence after deciding that going head-to-head at the box office with Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was a winnable battle, but at least Last Action Hero has been reappraised as not only a genuine cult classic but a trailblazer that was ahead of the curve on Hollywood’s increasing insistence on disregarding the fourth wall.
Never was that more apparent in the glorious parody where Schwarzenegger sends up William Shakespeare himself, a gag that works on so many levels. For one thing, the scene begins after the English teacher of Austin O’Brien’s Danny Madigan introduces Hamlet as “one of the first action heroes”, before playing footage from the 1948 adaptation starring Laurence Olivier.
Not only is it lauded as one of the greatest-filmed versions of the play that won ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Actor’ for Olivier at the Academy Awards, but the teacher is played by Joan Plowright, who was married to the legendary thespian from 1961 until his death in 1989, a sly visual reference that would have gone well over the heads of many.
One of the biggest – and completely pointless, given what he achieved – criticisms of Schwarzenegger during his time as an A-list megastar was that he possessed no acting ability whatsoever. He’d never tackle ‘The Bard’ under a conventional context, with the Hamlet scene effectively a middle finger to his detractors that lets him poke fun at his limitations while infuriating the purists even more.
The ‘Austrian Oak’ was famously described as having a range that stretched “from A to almost B” and reimagining one of the most famous and heavily adapted texts ever written as a vehicle for his signature style of quip-dropping, cigar-smoking and firearm-wielding pyrotechnics is Schwarzenegger intentionally playing to type while acknowledging that his inability to emote was hardly a detriment when he set out to conquer Hollywood.
The segue between an Oscar-winning Shakespeare adaptation starring one of the finest performers to ever grace stage and screen and Schwarzenegger’s anachronistic approach to Hamlet underlines the stark differences between what it means to be renowned as an actor, and what it takes to gain worldwide fame as a movie star.
The Terminator figurehead rolls out the one-liners, blows his enemies to smithereens, and puffs on more than one stogie as he barrels his way through the rottenness of the state of Denmark, and it’s a comment on heroism as a whole. The teacher refers to Hamlet as the originator of what an action hero could be, but in the early 1990s, Shakespeare and Olivier were hardly going to be the first names that came to mind in the age of Schwarzenegger and Stallone.
It’s a deconstruction of the classical set against the backdrop of current audience tastes and soaked in postmodernism, which is indicative of Last Action Hero as a whole. It’s deeply, unrelentingly silly, although that’s exactly why it works so well within the context of not only the movie but Schwarzenegger’s entire career: by shining a light on the unlikely intangibles that made him a household name, to begin with, and how ill-suited they are to even contemplate taking a straight-faced tilt at history’s most celebrated works.