My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  Lee succeeded in defunifying one of pop culture’s most beloved monsters, transforming a potentially camp spectacle into an experience more intellectual than visceral. And when it comes time for the Hulk to do battle with another monster in the hokey climax, Lee is as lost as a poetry professor at a demolition derby.

  Hulk stands as a unique attempt to infect a blockbuster with the gravity and pathos of a small-scale drama. I suspect history will be far kinder to it than the present, especially when it’s compared to the spate of comic-book adaptations that aspire to do nothing more than deliver the cheap thrills Hulk so assiduously avoids. Still, cheap thrills can be awfully fun, especially when accompanied by indiscriminate smashing.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Secret Success

  All-Time Action-Comedy Classic Book-Exclusive Case File: Last Action Hero

  There’s a wonderful passage in Nancy Griffith and Kim Masters’ book Hit And Run, a juicy account of Peter Guber and Jon Peters’ disastrous stint running/ruining Columbia Pictures. At the company Christmas party, Guber delivered a bone-dry, punishingly corporate speech. Morale was low. A great malaise had swept over the studio. Partygoers struggled to stay awake.

  Then, suddenly and with great bombast, a Hummer rumbled into the tent and zoomed up to the podium. A door swung open, and out sprang the world’s biggest movie star, ready to save the day. Arnold Schwarzenegger pumped up the flagging spirits of industry girly-men with an animated pep talk about the unimaginable riches awaiting Sony and Columbia upon the release of its forthcoming blockbuster/all-time action-comedy classic, 1993’s Last Action Hero.

  If the soiree had been an ’80s music video, the part of the wicked party starter who shows the squares how to have fun would have been filled by Van Halen, or possibly Twisted Sister, but Schwarzenegger inhabited the role beautifully. According to Griffith and Masters, having Schwarzenegger rock the Columbia Christmas party was less a nifty perk of getting into business with a giant movie star than the primary reason for green-lighting Last Action Hero in the first place. Reading Hit And Run and Studio, John Gregory Dunne’s wonderful impressionistic account of Fox at the turbulent tail end of the ’60s, it’s easy to get the impression that movies get made largely to give studio executives something to brag about at cocktail parties.

  And oh, did Last Action Hero give titans of the film industry something to talk about! Before the notorious flop became a source of tremendous shame, it was a source of enormous pride. Until it tanked, it looked like a surefire winner: a family-friendly, high-concept Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle from the screenwriter of Lethal Weapon and the director of Die Hard.

  The project began life as a spec screenplay by Zak Penn and Adam Leff, a pair of recent Wesleyan graduates with a million-dollar idea: What if a lonely boy raised on Hollywood blockbusters and genre crap could literally escape into the celluloid world of his favorite action hero? Alas, that premise proved to be a million-dollar idea only for the high-profile script doctors who rewrote the screenplay: first the screenwriting team of Shane Black and David Arnott, then the legendary William Goldman, who picked up his million for four weeks spent bulking up the relationship between the boy and the action hero who becomes his buddy, partner, and reluctant father figure.

  The film was rushed into production to meet a June 18 release date that put it firmly in the wake of another summer movie that insiders thought might do okay, Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park and Last Action Hero were the battling behemoths of the summer of 1993.

  Sony/Columbia went to ridiculous lengths to publicize its $120 million ($90 million for the film, $30 million for publicity) monster of a movie. This was back in the early ’90s, when $120 million still qualified as a lot of money. Most spectacularly, Columbia paid half a million dollars to have Schwarzenegger’s smirking mug painted onto the side of a space shuttle. The studio paid handsomely to have a glistening metallic enormo-cock penetrate outer space to create consumer awareness of Last Action Hero. It was simultaneously a brilliant, Barnumesque publicity stunt yielding millions of dollars’ worth of publicity, and a mark of desperation.

  As the film was raced to completion, bad buzz began to circulate. At a notorious early test screening, the results were so poor that the scorecards were shredded and Sony pretended the screening never happened. Black was called in for a last-minute rewrite for reshoots mere weeks before the film was scheduled to open, which happened to be a week after one of the biggest, most anticipated films of all time.

  Still, Sony and Columbia put on a brave face. Executive Mark Canton called Last Action Hero “probably the greatest action movie of all time.” Canton also called Bonfire Of The Vanities “the best movie I ever saw,” which suggests he was either being disingenuous or had seen only several other movies. It is important to bear in mind, dear reader, that these are the men who determine which movies get made and how those movies are distributed and marketed. That explains an awful lot.

  Columbia nevertheless held out hope that the primal power of Arnold Schwarzenegger toting around a big gun, tersely delivering wisecracks, and blowing holes through bad guys would overcome bad buzz, disastrous test scores, and Steven Spielberg’s infernal dinosaur movie. I like to imagine Mark Canton holding court at a cocktail party and having the following conversation about the film’s prospects:

  Random partygoer: How were the previews for Last Action Hero?

  Canton: Our glistening metallic enormo-cock will penetrate outer space to create consumer awareness of Last Action Hero.

  Random partygoer: Did John McTiernan nail the tone? ’Cause looking at the script, it seems like it’d be tricky to get the balance of comedy and action right.

  Canton: Our glistening metallic enormo-cock will penetrate outer space to create consumer awareness of Last Action Hero.

  Random partygoer: Yes, but does the juxtaposition of violent spectacle and meta-textual, self-referential comedy work?

  Canton: Our glistening metallic enormo-cock will penetrate outer space to create consumer awareness of Last Action Hero.

  Random partygoer: Okay, this is clearly a dead end, talking business. How are the wife and kids?

  Canton: Our glistening metallic enormo-cock will penetrate outer space to create consumer awareness of Last Action Hero.

  You get the picture.

  Last Action Hero opens with a scene from Jack Slater’s (Schwarzenegger) latest pyrotechnic-filled exercise in ultraviolence, which pitches the conventions of the action movie to ostensibly comic levels. Heartless villain. Perpetually enraged black police captain who runs the emotional gamut from apoplectic to heart-attack-inducingly angry. Wisecracking, indestructible hero.

  This points to the film’s first big problem: Schwarzenegger movies already verge on self-parody. So a Schwarzenegger spoof seems redundant. The novelty of Schwarzenegger parodying his tough-guy image is undermined by the fact that Schwarzenegger spoofs his tough-guy image in pretty much every movie he makes. There’s a self-deprecating edge to Schwarzenegger’s performances, a knowing wink that lets the audiences know he’s in on the joke.

  Last Action Hero later segues from the reel world to the real world, as pint-sized movie lover Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) watches Jack Slater III in a glorious old movie palace that’s about to close. Once upon a time, the theater was a sanctuary for movie lovers, but it’s devolved into a doomed skid-row attraction whose only customers are Danny and a homeless man looking for a place to sleep.

  Danny’s life outside the theater goes from bad to worse when thieves break into the sad little apartment he shares with his mother, Irene (Mercedes Ruehl), but Danny gets the opportunity of a lifetime when kindly projectionist Nick (Robert Prosky) offers to show him a print of Jack Slater IV before it opens. Even more exhilaratingly, Nick gives Danny a magical ticket bestowed to him by Harry Houdini. Danny uses the ticket to journey from one side of the screen to the other.

  A movie lover getting lost inside his favorite movie is a beautiful, resonant fantasy that prev
iously fueled masterpieces like Sherlock, Jr. and The Purple Rose Of Cairo. The conceit of being a representative of Schwarzenegger’s middle-school target demographic stuck inside a generic Schwarzenegger action movie feels more like cynical commercial calculation. McTiernan never seems comfortable with the film’s satirical elements, so he delivers what he imagines audiences want: a straightforward Schwarzenegger vehicle that’s maybe 15 percent more knowing, comic, and self-referential than its star’s usual blood-splattered fare. In the parlance of Hit And Run, it’s a “feathered fish” that doesn’t quite belong in the action or comedy realm.

  The film’s best moments come from screenwriters too smart for their own good, scribbling playfully in the margins. In the film’s sharpest gag, Danny uses the fact that Jack works alongside cartoon cat Whiskers (voiced by Danny DeVito) as proof that they’re in a movie. Jack replies that of course his precinct employs a cartoon cat—he’s one of their best detectives. The cartoon-cat subplot pays off unexpectedly when the cat returns to bail Jack out of a jam, but it also highlights the film’s feathered-fish status. Why should audiences be emotionally invested in a fantasy world where cartoon cats work alongside wisecracking musclemen? The filmmakers should have either run with the notion that Jack’s on-screen universe is a realm of pure fantasy where anything can happen, or abandoned the idea completely, instead of devoting about five minutes of screen time to comic-book fantasy and 115 minutes to its hero blowing shit up.

  With Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Shane Black’s brilliant 2005 directorial debut, the hotshot screenwriter embodied Jean-Luc Godard’s old maxim, “The best way to critique a movie is to make another movie.” Bang Bang was everything Last Action Hero should have been: a movie-mad deconstruction of the buddy movie that radiated love for the English language.

  Last Action Hero was seemingly destined to become one of the biggest hits of all time, until it became one of cinema’s most notorious flops. The thorough botch of a seemingly foolproof blockbuster brings to mind a famous Hollywood aphorism from Last Action Hero script doctor William Goldman about the difficulty of predicting a film’s failure or success: “Nobody knows anything.”

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure

  Disgustingly Patriotic Case File #122: The Rocketeer

  Originally Posted October 28, 2008

  Anyone who tells you the appeal of moviegoing isn’t at least partially voyeuristic is a goddamned liar and should be punched in the face repeatedly. We go to the movies to watch uncommonly beautiful people woo, romance, or reject other preternaturally fetching creatures in photogenic settings. As a young boy, I embraced movies as a socially acceptable way of looking at boobs. The fact that films were capable of art, truth, and beauty was a neat bonus.

  It’s been that way from the beginning. In a famous, perhaps apocryphal tale, early moviegoers were reportedly so terrified by the image of a train barreling toward them in the infamous early short “Oh My God, There Is A Real Train Barreling Toward You, You Are So Going To Die; Flee, Flee In Horror Unless You Want To End Up Flat As A Pancake, Your Internal Organs Splattered Against The Walls Of This Theater!” that they all began masturbating feverishly.

  Later, movie studios realized that showing sexy women and men in erotically charged situations was nearly as arousing to filmgoers as the prospect of imminent death. The scandalously erotic possibilities of film terrified the Man, so he sent a joyless scold named Will Hays to keep movies from devolving, or rather evolving, into a sticky, sweaty mass of writhing bodies pummeling every orifice in an omnisexual fuckfest of historic dimensions. In keeping with our nation’s history of hypocritical puritanism, the Hays Code dictated that kisses couldn’t last longer than a millisecond, jaywalking must be punished with death, and single people shown hugging, cuddling, or hand-holding must immediately be run over by an out-of-control train.

  But the Man couldn’t control our daydreams, so filmgoers continued to fantasize in the dark. Moviegoing is simultaneously a communal and anonymous endeavor. Lusting after the same handful of beauties binds us together. Drooling over Marilyn Monroe united fathers and sons, beatniks and squares, Americans and people who wish they were American on account of America being so awesome. USA! USA! USA! (Sorry ’bout getting jingoistic there. A little-known provision of the PATRIOT Act dictates that the chant “USA! USA! USA!” must appear at least twice in all film columns lasting more than 120 entries.)

  The language we use to talk about these figures of mass lust says much about the safe voyeurism of moviegoing. The term “America’s sweetheart,” for example, conveys our shared appreciation for women so glorious that a cultural consensus has been reached that they embody everything that is good and American about womanhood. Who doesn’t love Audrey Hepburn, in spite of her being, you know, not American? Only a goddamned Nazi, that’s who. And Nazis have no business pining for our Audrey.

  Sex symbols, in sharp contrast, need only ignite the universal libido. America’s sweethearts are always metaphorical virgins; sex symbols are voracious whores seducing us from afar.

  An amusing subsection of the sex-symbol genus is what is quaintly known as the thinking man’s sex symbol. That concept flatters cinephiles’ innate sense of superiority. It implies that even their libidos are discerning. Let the ignorant rabble have their saline-inflated Pamela Andersons and Jessica Simpsons. These sophisticated souls prefer the rarefied likes of Maggie Gyllenhaal or Tina Fey.

  Critics consequently walk a fine line between acknowledging the innate voyeurism of moviegoing and coming across as trenchcoat-sporting superpervs. Pauline Kael playfully acknowledged the voyeurism of cinephilia by giving her books suggestive titles: I Lost It At The Movies, Taking It All In, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Going Steady, Deeper Into Movies, When The Lights Go Down, Afterglow, and the infamous Handjob By The Popcorn Stand. Other critics let their prose drool for them. Reading Nicole Kidman, David Thomson’s heavy-breathing “appreciation” of the Australian ice queen, I didn’t know whether Kidman should send Thomson a thank-you letter or take out a restraining order against him. Similarly, Jeanine Basinger spends so much time panting over Tyrone Power in The Star Machine that I feared that she’d dig up Power’s skeleton, dress him up in fancy clothes, and gush, “My goodness, Tyrone, you’re even more divine looking as a rotting bag of bones! Why, if I were 20 years younger and you hadn’t died 50 years ago, I don’t know what might have happened!”

  What does any of this have to do with this My Year Of Flops Case File on 1991’s The Rocketeer? Well, I have always wanted to write the world’s longest, most lascivious, and needlessly digressive introduction to an essay about a PG-rated family film. Mission accomplished, just like our glorious commander in chief said when he single-handedly won the Iraq War. USA! USA! USA!

  More to the point, The Rocketeer features the most divine creature in the history of film: a 20-year-old Jennifer Connelly. Connelly plays a character whom the late comic-book artist Dave Stevens originally modeled after Bettie Page, whose strange, sordid career was predicated on being an impossible object of desire, a beautiful blank upon whom perverts could project their twisted fantasies. In Stevens’ comics, the love interest is even named Betty, though the film changed the character’s name (to Jenny Blake) and profession (from nude model to actress). Page lived to be seen, worshipped, adored. Connelly plays an idealized version of Page, the one Bettie Page wanted to be: an actress and a good girl, not the kind of virgin-whore who retains an air of innocence even while getting paddled by a mistress in bondage gear.

  In Career Opportunities and The Hot Spot, Connelly radiated the steam heat of a classic sex symbol. In The Rocketeer, she’s the quintessential America’s sweetheart. Since Requiem For A Dream, she’s become a frighteningly skinny waif who suffers disproportionately for our sins in an endless series of downers, earning her ambiguous status as a thinking man’s sex symbol. She’s mastered the art of being all things to all people.

  Connelly isn’t the only breathtaking aspect of The Rocketeer. It’
s a film of staggering glamour and beauty, an all-American tribute to the dangerous, exciting world of pulpy serials. Disney undoubtedly thought it had the next blockbuster franchise on its hands. It was not to be. A film series got snuffed in its infancy, leaving behind a raft of unsold Rocketeer action figures, cookie jars, lunch boxes, models, pins, cards, and videogames. Bill Campbell and Connelly both signed on for sequels that were never made. Even the biggest TV-ad push in Disney history at the time couldn’t drive audiences to the film. In spite of okay reviews and okay box office, the film was a brutal disappointment to Disney.

  Today, The Rocketeer stands as both a fascinating precursor to the film adaptation of Iron Man—though Iron Man made its comics debut decades before Stevens introduced the Rocketeer in a Starslayer comic in 1982—and as an antidote to the current spate of revisionist superhero efforts. We’ve been inundated with so many cinematic superheroes in need of therapy and mood stabilizers as of late that it’s refreshing to see a superhero whose biggest psychological weakness involves neglecting his bestest gal in favor of flying.

  As played by pretty boy Billy Campbell, Cliff, aka The Rocketeer, is a man devoid of existential angst and neurosis. All he wants to do is fly. He’s unabashedly a comic-book hero. We are dealing with archetypes here, characters lustily embodied by the dependable likes of Alan Arkin (as Peevy, the crusty father figure) and Paul Sorvino (as sausage-fingered mobster Eddie Valentine).

  The Rocketeer is defiantly old-fashioned. Like his mentors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, director Joe Johnston injects the pulp ephemera of yesteryear with newfangled technological sophistication. Period films tend to age gracefully; The Rocketeer, like the Indiana Jones series, feels like it could have been made in 1940 or yesterday: It’s timeless.