by Luke McKinney
Arnold Schwarzenegger has made more things involving ass-kicking than the guy who invented shoes. He’s best known for a superintelligent computer in charge of killing the entire world calculating that the most lethal killer ever should look like him. He didn’t even act in the first film, they just gave him a gun, pointed him in a direction, and made things explode around him.
The Terminator series is still cool despite becoming prophetic, now that the future is creating awful new robots whose only function is to destroy everything good we made in the past.
Terminator Salvation was the exact opposite. It did more damage to the Terminators than molten steel.
Schwarzenegger was so obviously an action hero they designed movies specifically so that he could learn to act and speak while already starring in them. That’s why he played a primitive barbarian, an emotionless robot, several extremely foreign foreigners, and a genetic experiment who’d been raised on a remote island utterly separated from humanity. Which is also the gang in the world’s most amazing heist movie, as soon as we sell the script. He’s the most autocompleted action star in history. For over a decade we were so convinced that Arnie could defeat absolutely any problem, the belief leaked into the real world and got him elected governor of California. Which is crazy, because all his opponents had to do was bring up Batman & Robin.
This kicks the crap out of sex scandals. In fact, being seen like this should have made sex scandals impossible.
But now he’s the one making a movie mistake in real life. He gave up the action for a career in politics, but now that his plans for world domination have failed, he’s fallen back on his old skills, trying to get his way through explosions and violence. That’s what every villain does towards the end of the movie. It never works. Schwarzenegger has become everything he ever used to throw through exploding plate glass windows in slow-motion.
Now we have to stop him before he destroys everything he ever did.
His comeback vehicle is The Last Stand, a movie about Schwarzenegger being old. He used to be a barbarian, a Terminator, a running man, and now he’s old. One of these things is not like the other or remotely suitable for an action movie. He leads a group of inexperienced sidekicks and every explanation of the movie is only one second from saying “wacky hijinks.” This is a movie starring Arnie and one of the Jackass crew, and their names have equal billing.
Is there any time in the past that would have made you happy? You’ve got the Commando acting as a father figure to a man who used to staple his own balls to his leg to get people to look at him.
Even the studio realize the problem, desperately trying to make it look kickass:
Brought to you by Lion’s Gate and product placement.
That looks like a movie I’d watch. That looks like a guy who’d arrest Knoxville on sight, then build a second story for the sheriff’s office with his bare hands just so that there’d be some stairs for the @$$#()!% to fall down. Which isn’t cruelty: that sort of thing is Knoxville’s entire skillset. Well, we could mention the time he starred in the Dukes of Hazzard remake, but it’s less embarrassing to describe that time he got tazed.
This is only the beginning. Nothing will be sacred. The most terrifying news is that they’re going to Triplets. Yes, of all the movies possible, they’re making a sequel to Twins. They’re bringing back Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito and adding Eddie Murphy. It’s like they’re taking the piss out of us with things that would have been great twenty years ago.
Eddie used to be the funniest comedian in the world, and now he’s going to spend ninety minutes in a movie where the main joke is “BUT HE’S BLACK!” followed by a record-scratch in the nursing home the target audience and stars met in. They’ve announced this but don’t have a writer yet, meaning that’s the only joke they’ve decided on for the entire movie.
Someone thinks we need more of this.
He’s also returning to the Terminator series. Even Terminator Salvation knew they had to computer generate him to make that work, and Terminator Salvation didn’t make anything work. Director Justin Lin dropped out of the proposed Terminator 5 to concentrate on Fast & Furious 6 instead. The Terminator franchise couldn’t suck more if T5 was about rogue Roombas.
Most impossibly of all, he’s going back to Conan.
Gleaming.
I don’t care how well it’s written, unless they bring in someone who can rewrite genetic code so that he’s thirty years younger that movie cannot work. The whole point of Conan was, well, it sounds wrong when you say the phrase “thrusting muscularity” out loud, but that was Conan’s entire deal. Arnie didn’t get that part for his acting ability. He got that part because his flesh sets off metal detectors but airport security let him through anyway, because it doesn’t matter if a man like that has a gun, he could just stand up and tear the wings off the plane anyway.
It’s only a matter of time before there’s a True Lies sequel. And while Jamie Lee Curtis thoughtfully had her body frozen in time below the neck, that doesn’t change the fact that True Lies ended with their kid knowing about the spying. Which means that the next movie will basically be Spy Kids. If we don’t stop him, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be in Spy Kids.
We have to stop him.
Luckily, the true hero of this story is still Arnold Schwarzenegger. His time-travel movie was Terminator, but his true time capsule was something else. The young hero saw the future, realizing that total media domination inevitably leads to an people being @$$#()!%$ who have to be stopped. So he made a movie about that, a perfect time capsule of everything we love, so that we might always be true to ass-kicking. Please. It’s for his own good. He has enough money. From now on, every time he releases a new movie, just stay home and watch the Running Man. I guarantee it’s for the best.
“Here is your Sub-Zero! Now just plain zero.”
And that you’ll be watching a better movie.
Luke keeps up the action movie theme by explaining Why Die Hard Is The Greatest Christmas Movie Ever, and learns from them too with ![I TOLD YOU TO STOP USING MY TOOTHBRUSH!]( "Stop Arnold Schwarzenegger for His Own Good")
