LogFAQs > #976243652

I'm Going to Kill You Last
Last Action Hero: Part of what makes Arnold's movies compelling is their lack of self-awareness. It's that you have this cartoonish figure the size of a truck running around, solving all of his problems with violence, saying the stupidest things imaginable, and the movie never acknowledges that this is dumb. I could go off on a tangent about this being why Marvel films fail a lot, but to keep this focused on LAH: Arnold's last truly good movie was from 1991, and yeah, he had a couple of watchable movies after that, but LAH is the beginning of the end for him. This is where Arnold stops being Action Man and becomes Funny Action Man, and Funny Action Man is much less funny. You understand, right? But hell, even setting aside all Arnold-related issues, meta-stuff has to be done PERFECTLY to be good. Bad, or even flawed, meta-stories are always terrible. LAH has a lot of sort of neat ideas, but the only meta joke in the entire thing that's actually good is when the kid learns that this world's version of Terminator stars Sylvester Stallone. Everything else? There are parts that are mildly clever, like Arnold taking a bullet in the real world that will slowly kill him, but going back to the movie world where it's something you can walk off, but none of it is compelling, none of it is good. And then you have the corny one-liners that are WRITTEN to be corny, instead of written to be badass. People still say "I'll be back," no one says "You want to be a farmer? Here's some acres," and punch a guy in the balls. This isn't even close to Arnold's worst film, but it represents the worst of what he became. I want to be clear, though: there can't be another Arnold. There will never be another Arnold, at least not in Hollywood. You just can't have someone with that little self-awareness run around doing action things and have the audience take him seriously anymore.
Mortal Kombat: Because the Terminator was a guest character in one of these games, right? Look. As a kid, MK to me was very clearly the wannabe Street Fighter, the Pepsi to its Coke, the Burger King to its McDonald's. It always looked worse, played worse, and had worse locations for its cabinets in arcades and bowling alleys. Why would you ever play this when you could play Street Fighter instead? All MK had going for it was that it was the only early 90s series to embrace violence and gore, and once other games started doing that, it didn't even have that anymore. For God's sake, even as a little kid, I could tell the palette swap ninja thing was just a way to lazily save money and time, and I was like six. I know MK has a resurgence in the last decade, and that's fine, but I just do not see any appeal in this series at all, not when you could play Street Fighter, Tekken, Soul Calibur, and Smash instead.
The Expendables 1: I have a great contempt for this series. The idea of gathering up all the 80s action stars for a crossover is terrible to begin with, because it's inherently a self-aware joke. You can never take it seriously the way you can pretend to take Terminator 2 seriously, or Demolition Man (which is more of a comedy, but whatever). But then on top of that, you make this movie in 2010, twenty years after Stallone was last relevant, and you only have Stallone and Bruce Willis in it, with Arnold in the briefest cameo ever. No Van Damme, no Steven Seagal, no nothing. This is like the saddest 'old man tries to be young again' film ever, and we haven't even gotten to the film itself. The only thing in this entire movie I enjoyed was the scene where a guy attaches C4 to various objects around the bad guy's compound, then he presses the button to detonate it all, and it quick-cuts to everything exploding, including a car he didn't attach C4 to. That was actually clever.
Austrian Death Machine: I listened to some of their music. It's not very good. I've never heard of them, they can't be that popular, right? Does... does anyone actually like death metal? It's just so unpleasant.
Conan O'Brien's Arnold via Satellite Skits: I had never heard of this, so I googled it. It wasn't funny. Sorry! This is like the worst and least funny comedy I've ever seen? Man, I forgot that TV looked this bad in 2003. Goddamn, a Terminator 3 reference. "S.W.A.T. is now the #1 movie." Jesus, there was a moment in history when S.W.A.T. was the world's most popular film?

Veto
Yu-Gi-Oh GX: I have no idea what the Arnold connection is, and I've never watched this show to begin with.