The Dinosaur And the Dog

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: LAST ACTION HERO

DIRECTOR: JOHN McTIERNAN

WRITERS: ZAK PENN, ADAM LEFF, SHANE BLACK AND DAVID ARNOTT

THE BOTTOM LINE: Arnold Schwarzenegger battles his fiercest foe yet: the rumor mill that says his pricey new movie will fail.

In Jurassic Park, Hollywood apparently has a dinosaur-size hit. Now the town thinks it smells a dog. Last Action Hero, the Arnold Schwarzenegger adventure opening this week, has spurred doomsday rumors because of its ballistic budget (estimates run up to $120 million), a reputedly disastrous sneak preview last month, and the subsequent three-day shooting of a new sequence.

Columbia Pictures, anxious about its huge investment, quickly sent in the spin doctors. The studio did get "slightly panicked" at the preview, says co-writer David Arnott. "Clearly the movie was too long, and the jokes needed timing tweaks. But a lot of people liked it." The new sequence was just "Arnold never giving up on anything," says director John McTiernan. "He guilted us all into shooting it." Now he has to hope that, oh, 40 million Americans will be guiled or guilted into seeing it.

Danny (the appealing Austin O'Brien) is a lonely New York City kid who lives for the movies. He is about to live in them, when a "magic ticket" propels him through the screen and into the latest action epic of his film hero, Jack Slater (Schwarzenegger). "We're perfect buddy-movie material," the boy tells his reluctant new partner. "I'll teach you to be voluble. You'll teach me to be brave." Having seen part of the picture, Danny knows that Jack is in peril from a bull's-eye assassin (Charles Dance). There's a lot that Jack, poor simple muscle-bound dear, doesn't know -- including that he's a fictional character. When he chases the assassin out of movieland into the "real" world, he finds that other rules apply. Heroes get hurt. People could die.

Since Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. in 1924, Hollywood has often toyed with the looking-glass motif, though never on Hero's mammoth scale, where so many cars crash that the audience becomes rubberneckers. Schwarzenegger, a live- action cartoon in the flesh, and McTiernan, who made the brains explode on time in Die Hard, might seem just the team to send up the dizzy conventions of the action genre. At first they do so, smartly. A wounded cop mutters, "Two days to retirement," and promptly dies. And Arnold's version of Hamlet is even funnier than Mel Gibson's. "To be, or not to be," he says, lighting his trademark cigar stub. "Not to be." And Elsinore goes boom! But after a while, as the facetious film references (to everything from E.T. to The Seventh Seal pile up, Hero turns into the industry's all-time costliest inside joke. Watching it is as enervating as being on a real movie set. You see all of the sweat and none of the starlight.

The picture fails on a common Hollywood fallacy: that because people lap up celebrity tattle and flock to movie-studio tours, they must be fascinated by the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. Last Action Hero (which is the ultimate studio tour as surely as Jurassic Park is the ultimate theme-park ride) starts out mostly nuts, and winds up mostly bolts. Or, rather, winds down. That's a problem with pastiche: it must be constantly jump-started with ingenuity, and even that ultimately pales. By the end, nothing matters.

In this movie's final reel, Jack begs Danny, "Believe in me." But by then he has forfeited the right to ask. Moviegoers can pretend to care about screen heroes; it's called suspension of disbelief. But they can't pretend to pretend to care. So when Danny confidently tells Jack, "You can't die till the grosses go down," we must wonder if that pertains to Schwarzenegger too. He needs Last Action Hero to be as big as Jurassic Park. And our guess is: Not to be.

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles