arnold schwarzenegger

Twins (1988)

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Comedic director Ivan Reitman is perhaps best known for his 80s trinity of goofball collaborations with sad sack enigma Bill Murray: Meatballs, Stripes, and (if the piss babies who light up internet message boards are to be believed) the most beloved comedy of all time, Ghostbusters. What’s funny to me is that Reitman has collaborated on just as many comedic properties with an entirely different type of 1980s personality: Arnold Schwarzenegger. The first three Schwarzenegger films that could comfortably be considered straight-forward comedies (Kindergarten Cop, Junior, and Twins) were all helmed by Reitman. It’s a director-actor collaboration that may not have inspired much critical praise in its time, but did help steer & reshape Arnold’s career into the more kid-friendly (yet still violent) territory of titles like The Last Action Hero & T2: Judgement Day that inspired many lifetime fans of the Austrian galoot’s oddly affable screen presence (myself included). The first of these collaborations, 1988’s Twins, was a movie that had somehow slipped by me until now and I feel forever foolish for living so much of my life without it. I should have grown up with this Arnold-Reitman classic as a youngster. I really liked it as an adult, but I would’ve loved it as a scamp.

Twins’s living cartoon narrative is blatantly written around its improbable casting. The film is strange, modern fairy tale that starts once upon a time in a science lab where six successful, elite men (athletes, professors, the like) and one beautiful woman donate their reproductive faculties to an experiment meant to create the world’s finest human specimen. Arnold Schwarzenegger portrays the result of that experiment (duh), the buffoonish supergenius Julius Benedict, who’s just as inhumanly strong & intelligent as he is devoid of common sense. The unintended side effect of the experiment and, naturally, Julius’s twin, is Vincent Benedict, a weird little sex magnet sleazeball played with pitch perfect hubris by Danny DeVito. Ignoring the “master race” Nazi ideal implications of this comedic setup, the casting of Schwarzenegger & DeVito in their respective roles as “the most fully developed human the world has ever seen” & “the crap that was left over” is pure, inspired genius, a dynamic that never stops being amusing over the film’s entire runtime. Twins finds particular delight in contrasting the two strangely loveable actors’ wildly disparate statures by dressing them in matching outfits & having them synchronize their movements in simple tasks like eating breakfast & washing their hands. It’s what the WWE refers to as “twin magic.” Not satisfied with hammering the point home in this endlessly repeated gag, the entire joke is capped off with the concluding punchline, “I just can’t get over how alike they are!” just before the end credits. It’s all wonderfully silly & relentlessly good-natured (except maybe for some stray Adventures in Babysitting-type indulgences in Reagan Era fears of the big city).

Twins ostensibly knows that the inherent silliness of its comedic setup doesn’t leave much room for small concerns like plot or character development, but instead of avoiding those storytelling requirements it doubles down & attempts to tackle them head on. There’s no less than four plots at work in Twins: one in which the titular duo embark on a cross-country road trip to meet their estranged parents; one where Vincent teaches Julian the value of street smarts & Julius returns the favor with the value of familial love; one where both brothers become romantic targets for women who find their respective physicalities irresistible; and one where they’re, no joke, hunted down by a mafia hitman from whom they unwittingly steal precious, illegal cargo. As if that all weren’t overwhelming enough, the film also attempts to have a lot to say about the nature vs nurture conundrum as well as the effect privilege has on someone’s life trajectory (the well-adjusted Julius was raised by a wealthy scientist; the slimeball Vincent was abandoned at an orphanage). It’s as if Twins knew its premise couldn’t possibly sustain any kind of worthwhile narrative or emotional investment, so it intentionally ate up its own runtime with an nonstop barrage of subplots & asides to hang its Schwarzenegger big/DeVito small visual gags off of. Whether or not this formula was intentional, it’s entirely successful and by the time it faces a climax at the same vague industrial complex all 80s films seem to end at, the whole thing feels remarkably silly & delightfully convoluted.

I’ve been doing my best in recent years to establish my own personal tradition of watching an annual Schwarzenegger film on my birthday, which is how I ended up watching Twins for the first time at the ripe age of 30. As an Arnold showcase, the film did not disappoint (no offense meant to DeVito, who was perfectly amusing as the con artist straight man). Casting the typically meathead-typecast Schwarzenegger as a supergenius was, uh, super genius enough on its own, but the film goes a step further by robbing him of common sense due to an extremely sheltered childhood, so that he’s some kind of an oxymoronic genius-idiot. This leads to a bottomless wealth of classic Schwarzenegger comedy bits, some as simple as watching him eat ice cream, pose with a Rambo poster, or misunderstand idioms in lines like, “Thank you for the cookies. I’m looking forward to tossing them.” The film even works in a reading of his classic Terminator line “I’ll be back,” because of course it does. Arnold’s consistently wonderful screen presence makes Julius an impossibly endearing goof, especially in moments when he butchers the Coasters song “Yakety Yak” in his incredibly thick Austrian accent or when he doesn’t recognize that he’s being shamelessly hit on by a ready-to-pounce Kelly Preston or robbed by violent street toughs. Julius will even go as far as apologizing when said robbery doesn’t go well, explaining of a fallen reprobate who fails to nab his briefcase, “I did nothing. Pavement was his enemy.”

Arnold had already halfheartedly tried his hand at comedy in his narrative film debut Hercules in New York, but that work is more unintentionally funny than anything & uses the bodybuilder exclusively for the size of his pecs, not his impeccable sense of comedic timing. Twins is where Schwarzenegger truly found his comedic voice and it arrived in a perfect moment for him to bounce that voice off his mismatched twin DeVito & a hilariously dated onslaught of cheesy 80s fashion & pop music trash. It seems that this good will won’t be forever buried in the oversized suit jackets & greasy ponytails of the past either. Just as Paul Feig was allowed to “ruin” childhoods in his recent remake of Ivan Reitman’s crown jewel, Ghostbusters, Reitman himself is attempting to revive the Twins property for a modern audience in an announced, decades-late sequel titled Triplets. The premise of Triplets would bring back Schwarzenegger & DeVito as Julius & Vincent, bowling them over with the discovery that they actually share a birthday with a third brother/wombmate, played by none other than Eddie Murphy. It’s a plot twist that makes absolutely no goddamn sense for so, so many reasons, but that didn’t stop the original Twins from being thoroughly delightful & I’m more than ready for Arnold to make a comeback to his comedy career, so I say bring it on. As long as the film ends with the line “I just can’t get over how alike they are,” I’m sure I’ll be happy.

-Brandon Ledet

Girl Walk // All Day (2011) & 5 Other Must-See “Visual Albums”

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There has been so much crossover between pop music & film over the decades that it’s almost difficult to distinguish exactly what makes May’s Movie of the Month, the full-length Girl Talk dance video Girl Walk // All Day, such a unique work. From the Beatles movies to MTV to beyond, pop musicians have turned to cinema as an outlet in many varied ways, not least of all including the music video, the concert film, and the tour documentary. Often enough, this visual element can be treated as a mere means of promotion, a backseat accompaniment to the true product being sold: the music itself. There are certainly some major exceptions to that music-video-as-advertisement mentality, however.

The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, The Who’s Tommy, and Prince’s Purple Rain are all readily recognizable examples of major musicians trying to put their music to film by constructing a feature-length narrative work with songs from a single album interjected between the plot points as punctuation. The concert film is its own artform, one perfected by more experimental examples like The Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense & Björk’s Biophilia Live (I’m sure Kanye West’s Jodorowsky-inspired Yeezus film will be right up there if he ever releases the damn thing), but they don’t seem quite as solid of a music-meets-film artform as the narrative versions of the records mentioned above. The problem that even the narrative music movies (something we’ve previously referred to as Pop Music Cinema around here) feel somewhat stilted in their integration of music & cinema, not quite reaching a fully-formed, fully-committed ideal. Concert films are a type of documentary. Narrative pop music films are often a next-stage evolution of the Broadway musical where the songs punctuate the dialogue as a kind of emotional spike or act break. Neither are 100% the music video as feature-length cinema.

Girl Walk // All Day feels different from most of pop music cinema’s past because it is more of pure conversion of the music video into the feature-length film medium. The most apt term I’ve heard to describe what I’m getting at here was recently coined by Beyoncé as “the visual album” (more on that below). I like that term because it distinguishes the artform from the “music video album”, which is quite literally just a collection of music videos, as opposed to a feature-length, singular work that poses the music video as a narrative artform. Think of the difference between The Beatles’ album Please Please Me and their more thematically cohesive later works like Abbey Road and you’ll see the same difference between “the music video album” and “the visual album”. Just because Beach House released a music video for every track on Teen Dream doesn’t mean all the videos from that record function as a singularly-minded, narratively cohesive collection. Girl Walk // All Day is a (fan-made) visual representation of a Girl Talk mixtape in its entirety. It’s much more akin to a music video than a traditional musical, but it still functions as a feature-length, narrative work with a (loose plot) entirely driven by the shifting dynamics of its soundtrack. Nothing exists in a void, however. Just because Girl Walk // All Day is, in my mind at least, the most fully-realized convergence of the music video & the feature film into a singular work doesn’t mean it was the first, last, or most significant example of its kind.

There are many other “visual albums” out there in the world and I’ve collected a solid list of five examples below of some of the highlights of the genre, including, of course, the Beyoncé work I lifted the term from. I don’t think the “visual album” has yet reached hit its peak. There’s plenty of room for the artform to expand into an distinct medium worthy of respect & adoration. I could even argue that the “visual album” is the logical next step for the musical as cinema, a medium that has stagnated in a lot of ways over the past few decades. Here’s five boudnary-pushing examples of the visual album that offer a distinctive look on where the genre could presumably go in the future, each promising just as much innovation as Girl Walk // All Day, if not more.

 

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1. Lemonade (2016)

It’d be a shame to praise the “visual album” as an artform without mentioning the source of where I lifted the term. It also helps that the product itself is an exquisite work of art. Beyoncé has been going through a spiritual growth spurt in the last few years where she’s struggling to break away from her long-established persona of top-of-the-world pop idol to reveal a more creative, vulnerable persona underneath. Her recent “visual album” Lemonade feels like a culmination of this momentum, a grand personal statement that cuts through her usual “flawless” visage to expose a galaxy of emotional conflicts & spiritual second-guessings the world was previously not privy to. It’s at times a deeply uncomfortable experience, as if you’re reading someone’s diary entries or poetry as they stare you down. However, it can also be an empowering & triumphant one, particularly aimed at giving a voice to the underserved POV of being a young black woman in modern America.

Lemonade is significant to the visual album medium not only for giving it a name, but also pushing the boundaries of form & narrative. In some ways it resembles the traditional mode of a “music video album” in that it represents each track from the audio version of Lemonade with a distinctly separate music video. Those rigid divisions serve mostly as chapter breaks, however, as the spoken word pieces that bind them represent an overall, loose narrative tableau about romantic grief, revenge, vulnerability, and empowerment. It’s the same kind of cryptic dialogue vs powerful cinematography formula that’s been driving Terrence Malicks’ work for years. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the Beyhive, Ill confess that I don’t find every risk Lemonade takes pays off (the country song & the poetry can both be a bit much for me at times), but I respect its ambition in a general sense, especially when the more powerful, successful moments hit you like a ton of emotional bricks. Lemonade names, expands, and complicates the concept of the visual album as a medium and demands to be seen if you have an interest in the meeting place where the music video blurs with cinema.

 

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2. The Line, the Cross and the Curve (1993)

I’ve been a huge Kate Bush fan since I first heard The Hounds of Love & The Dreaming in high school, but it took me a good, long while to get into her work from the 90s & beyond.There’s a pop slickness to Kate Bush’s sound, as strange is it is, that can be a little off-putting to me depending on the production .It was the short film The Line, the Cross and the Curve that finally unlocked this world for me and in the years since I first watched it Bush’s 1993 album The Red Shoes has become one of my favorites from the brilliant singer/songwriter. Composed of six music video segments pulled from the twelve tracks on The Red Shoes, The Line, the Cross and the Curve is a short film directed by Bush herself that mimics the 1948 Powell-Pressburger masterpiece The Red Shoes as a basic framework before deviating into something idiosyncratically sensual & surreal. Girl Walk // All Day might be the most successive marriage of the music video & the narrative feature film and Lemonade deserves its own accolades for expanding & labeling the “visual album” as an artform, but The Line, the Cross and the Curve is still a personal pet favorite for me based on pure emotional impact alone.

Bush recorded The Red Shoes in the wake of her emotional devastation of losing two loved ones & suffering a romantic break-up in a single year. The film version & the album both hold a similar cryptic diary/therapy dynamic as Lemonade, but the range & depth of emotions on display in The Line, the Cross and the Curve sometimes reach a sensual, celebratory jubilee not touched by Beyoncé’s distant descendant. I’m thinking particularly of the lush fruitscape of the “Eat the Music” portion of the film, a visual representation of a song so strong that it turned a tune I was too cynical to appreciate into one of my favorite pop music diddies of all time. Bush’s film also can play it tender (“Moments of Pleasure”) or demonically wicked (“The Red Shoes”) depending on its mood and although the singer/songwriter/dancer/director herself has gone on record voicing her frustration with the finished product, I find it to be something of a masterpiece, an early pinnacle of the “visual album” medium. My only complaint is that it could’ve easily included the other six tracks from The Red Shoes & functioned as a feature film.

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3. Ultimate Reality (2007)

One of the strangest concert experiences of my life was one of the first (of many wonderful) times I saw Dan Deacon perform live. Instead of having a traditional opening act for this particular tour, Deacon’s set was preceded by a “live performance” of his “visual album” Ultimate Reality. Two drummers took the stage to simultaneously perform on top of Deacon’s trademark synth carnage as a live soundtrack to a film that was projected behind them (provided by visual artist & frequent Deacon collaborator Jimmy Joe Roche). Scrapping together clips from Arnold Schwarzenegger classic from various phases of the action movie god’s career, Ultimate Reality repurposes the Governator’s past work into a single, kaleidoscopic mess of confusingly plotted narrative & eye-burning psychedelia.

Ultimate Reality approaches the music video as cinema concept from the same jubilant, illegal mindframe as Girl Walk // All Day, except it blends all of its “borrowed” material into an endurance contest instead of a crowd-pleasing celebration of the art of dance. There’s a very loose narrative plot at work in the film that tells some kind of time-traveling story Arnold thwarting a doomsday scenario, but it’s an entirely superfluous to the work’s true bread & butter: mind-melting visual & aural assault. Ultimate Reality is simultaneously one of the most beautiful & the most difficult to watch visual albums you’re ever likely to see (it’s pretty much literally a technicolor kaleidoscope of Arnold Schwarzenegger clips & Dan Deacon synths, after all). It’s by far my favorite way way to clear my house at the end of a party. Just pop in the DVD & watch them scatter.

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4. Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (2003)

I’m far, far, far from an electronica fan, which makes me a bit of a sourpuss when it comes to enjoying the immensely popular French pop duo Daft Punk. A few singles will catch my attention every now & then, but listening to one of their albums in its entirety is something I’m not likely to ever to do voluntarily. Every rule has its exceptions, however, and I have found myself blaring the band’s soundtrack for the underrated cheap thrill Tron: Legacy. There’s something integrally cinematic about Daft Punk’s music that lends it well to soundtrack work, especially sci-fi movies and I would gladly watch any film the band scores for their contributions alone. It’s a good thing, then, that the Daft Punk visual album Interstella 5555 is a sci-fi film mostly set in outer space.

A French-Japanese co-production constructed by Toei Animation, the production studio behind legendary works like Sailor Moon & Dragon Ball Z, Interstella 5555 illustrates Daft Punk’s hit album Discovery in its entirety. Much like with Girl Walk // All Day, the visual album features no dialogue outside the band’s lyrics (which are at one point sampled in the Girl Walk movie, coincidentally), but its narrative is much more solid & vividly clear. In the movie the space alien band The Crescentdolls is kidnapped by an American record studio/ancient cult and forced to perform a one hit wonder & sign autographs for adoring fans at a punishingly repetitive schedule. Their quest to escape this hopeless imprisonment rests in the hands of a mercenary hero who flies around in a guitar-shaped spaceship & spends a lot of his time rocking out to bonafide jams while floating around in a vacuum. The film is beautiful, funny, terrifying, and easily recognizable as one of the best examples of the visual album to date. I’ll admit that somewhere around the third act the repetition of the dance music started to exhaust me a bit, but if you’re a more committed Daft Punk fan you might not even have that problem. As far as accomplishing the goals it establishes for itself, the film is wholly successful & thoroughly delightful.

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5. Trapped in the Closet (2005-2012)

R. Kelly is, in all likelihood, a complete monster (unless you want to consider the shocking pile of evidence against his good name hearsay), but that doesn’t mean he’s not an entertaining monster. There are so many ridiculous phases & highlights to the R&B singer’s career that I’m not even going to attempt to touch on them, here, but I think it’s fairly clear that his de facto magnum opus, Trapped in the Closet, has earned its place among the most noteworthy examples of the visual album medium. Kelly took the idea of a narrative film music video hybrid literally to the point of outright hilarity. Described as a “rap opera”, the seemingly never-ending saga of Trapped in the Closet follows the second-by-second developments of a love triangle that spirals out of control into an absurdly complicated web of deceipt, revenge, murder, and romance.

Trapped in the Closet is a gloriously silly watch (even when it’s offensively close-minded) and at times feels way more akin to a daytime soap opera than music video cinema, but it’s inspired so much pop culture weirdness to follow (including a glorious Weird Al parody & what’s easily one of the best Wikipedia pages I’ve ever read) that it’s near impossible to discuss the visual album as a concept without including its name. Trapped in the Closet may aim for a more straight-forward narrative than Girl Walk, Lemonade, etc. (even hilariously so), but easily matches those projects in ambition & sheer audacity. R. Kelly combined the music video & the narrative feature into a single, punishing, over-the-top work of high camp. Even if you can’t stomach the idea of sitting through all 33 “chapters” of the monotonously bonkers story, you should at least consider getting a taste of the early episodes and skimming through the Wikipedia plot synopsis, including this flow chart of who’s bonked whom in its web of sex & lies.

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For more on May’s Movie of the Month, the 2011 narrative dance video Girl Walk // All Day, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Sabotage (2014)

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Loving Arnold Schwarzenegger can sometimes mean loving repetition. There are distinct phases to the action legend’s career where he shifts gears & tries new types of films, but he’s pretty much consistently the same old Arnold in each role. Whether it’s The Running Man, Commando, or Kindergarten Cop, all wildly different films, he’s pretty much consistently the spotless tough guy with a great sense of comic timing & an unexplained Austrian accent. It’s been interesting to see, though, where he wants to go with his career in its latest phase. The post-gubernatorial, elderly Arnold is a strange bird, one that’s difficult to pigeonhole just yet. In projects like Terminator Genisys & The Last Stand, it definitely feel like he’s slipping back into his old ways, but then there’s more out-there choices like this year’s zom-drama Maggie, which showed him playing tender & quietly pensive. I didn’t enjoy Maggie very much on the whole, but I did respect Arnold’s vulnerability in getting out there & trying something new at this late stage of his career, even if he was disappointingly quiet & inexpressive in that role.

It wasn’t until I saw last year’s Sabotage that I got a glimpse of where I’d love Arnold’s career to go. Playing a crooked, disgraced DEA agent who heads an out-of-control crew that has devolved more or less into a gang, Arnold subverts his eternally unblemished good guy routine for the first time I can remember since The Terminator. And he does it so well. There’s something so satisfying to see him pull a (to borrow a pro wrestling term) heel-turn at this point of his career & play a cigar-chomping scumbag driven out of his mind by the violence of Mexican drug cartels. It’s already a little jarring to watch him head a team instead of falling into his usual lone wolf Commando routine, but it’s even more jarring to watch him head a team of such hopeless reprobates.

The catch with Sabotage is that Arnold is far from the film’s only scumbag. The entire film is just oozing with scum. I felt dirty just watching it. With character names like “Breacher” & “Grinder” and a visual palette that makes time to include blood, shit, and viscera, Sabotage is an ugly, ugly film. Much like with Swordfish & See No Evil, it’s the kind of movie where nearly every line of dialogue is loaded with an insult. Characters constantly call each other “assholes” & “crackwhores” and command each other to “Shut the fuck up” or “Wake up, you drunk fuck” or to quit “fingering The Devil’s pussy.” It’s far from a pleasant film & I wasn’t surprised to learn afterwards that the dude who wrote & directed it was also responsible for penning both Training Day & that upcoming Suicide Squad movie. David Ayer apparently has an eye & an ear for the grotesque and from what I’ve seen from his work this kind of nastiness is something he brings to the screen often.

The only truly remarkable thing about Sabotage‘s nastiness is that it managed to drag Schwarzenegger through the mud with it. This is far from the actor’s first ultraviolent rodeo, but his bloody action films usually have a sort of detached, cartoonish nature to them that’s intentionally missing here. Although Arnold’s shown chomping cigars & pumping iron in Sabotage, he’s almost unrecognisable as the film’s King Scumbag. I honestly appreciated that about the film. Its I Know What You Did Last Summer revenge plot was tolerable, but not exactly thrilling, and it was severely lacking for a single pleasant image or line of dialogue or any ray of sunshine, really to break through its deeply nasty, garbage water pessimism, but Arnold’s performance kinda made up for those shortcomings. There’s a really interesting idea at the heart of the way he plays villain here & I’d love to see that thread explored in other, more easy-to-stomach projects in the future.

-Brandon Ledet

Terminator Genisys (2015)

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In the recent flood of reboots, remakes, reimaginings and good, old-fashioned sequels that have effectively taken over Hollywood, there’s been an occasional uproar about what these films are doing to the credibility of the films they’re resurrecting. A few rehashes of long-dead properties have been lauded as critical darlings (such as the fever dream action monster Mad Max: Fury Road), but a lot of them have been met with aploplectic rage, such as Paul Feig’s not-even-released-yet take on Ghostbusters. Part of what Feig is getting flack for is tampering with the original formula, trying his damnedest to give his reboot its own reason to exist, and being met with a resounding opposition that claims he’s “ruining their childhood.” It’s sort of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t endeavor, creatively speaking, since studios are pouring so much money into these retreads instead of fresh material, but it’d also be entirely pointless to just remake the original film faithfully, except with temporal markers like smart phones & drone-operated cameras to provide modern context (like in the utterly useless Poltergeist remake).

Terminator Genisys has a fun time not only acknowledging the fact that reboots & sequels have a tendency to tarnish the memory of the films that came before them (according to a hypersensitive few), but it revels in the idea. Using the time travel paradox theme from the first couple films in the series, Genisys tinkers with & dismantles its predecessors in a dismissive, disrespectful way that feels alarmingly bold for a film that eventually amounts to a long string of chase scenes. The first hour of the film features a jumble of timelines that interact not only with the 1984 & 1991 stories told in The Terminator & T-2: Judgement Day, but also fleshes out some of the 2024 revolution, makes a pitstop in 1972 that changes the whole game of the first film, and sets up an entirely new Skynet timeline that needs to be dismantled in 2017. It’s a doozy of an opening sequence that features cheap, literal imitations of exact scenes from the earlier movies & repurposes them for its own ends, the implications of how it unravels the first two films be damned. I respect its moxy in this respect, even if the execution was far from flawless.

There’s a televised news report in Terminator Genisys that features the hilariously self-aware headline “Has Genisys gone too far?” This plays like a direct nod to how the film is not only disrespectful to its audience as Terminator fans, but also calls them out as a bunch of technology-obsessed dolts who would allow a computer program to end human existence as long as it promised to make their lives easier. The idea of a killer app that links all of the world’s smartphone technology into one conveniently vulnerable control is far from unique. At the very least, I’ve already seen that concept play out twice this year in Furious 7 & Avengers: Age of Ultron. It’s still interesting to see it tie into an action movie’s larger overriding idea that its own audience is worth disdain. There are so many shots of people emptily gazing into their smart phones as a doomsday scenario swirls around them that even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s give-the-people-what-they-want one-liners like “I’ll be back” feel like a dig at the audience’s expectations. It’s so weird to see a film both fulfil movie-goer’s desire to see an old scenario play out yet again & subvert that desire by tearing apart the timelines of the original films by making them irrelevant, or as Schwarzenegger’s cyborg says of himself in this film, obsolete.

Speaking of Arnold, he’s the only enjoyable member of the film’s cast, performing with a weary, but endearing charm that says both “I’m too old for this shit” & “This is all I know how to do”. As a lifelong fan, I’m delighted by the idea of Arnold stretching himself to try new things, but if that means more snoozers like Maggie instead of the one-liner-fueled killing machine performances like in Genisys & the surprisingly enjoyable The Last Stand, I’m also more than happy to just see him filling this role for the rest of his life. No one else in the cast makes much of an impression at all, which (along with a who-cares 2017 climax sequence) tampers my enthusiasm for the film a bit, but that’s okay too.

Look, this is a franchise that’s already been dragged through the mud. Its first two entries are undeniable classics, but Terminator 3 & worse yet, Salvation weren’t exactly memorable cinema. Although I admire Terminator Genisys‘ mission to go back in time & effectively murder its predecessors, it’s an impossible mission. No matter what, those movies still exist & they’re still great. You can revisit your un-ruined childhood anytime you want through Netflix or blu-Rays or murderous smart phone apps or whatever you like, really. They’re still there. We just now also have a serviceable sequel that jumbles the timelines of those films into a barely-coherent mess just to watch its audience squirm under the pressure. I happen to find that tactic pretty hilarious, even if it did have trouble sticking the landing.

-Brandon Ledet

Maggie (2015)

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When the basic concept of Maggie was first released in the press, it felt like a godsend. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger has returned to acting (after an infamously shaky stint as a politician), he’s been landing a lot of roles that attempt to revive his action movies heyday, including Terminator & Extendable sequels as well as the surprisingly-fun throwback Last Stand. Maggie promised to be something new for Arnold entirely. A somber drama in which Arnold plays a family man struggling to keep his life together in the wake of a zombie apocalypse felt like an opportunity for the old dog to learn new tricks, to show his fans a side of his talent that they’ve never seen before. We were finally going to see Arnold in a role far outside his normal mode as a murderous, wise-cracking pile of muscles.

Unfortunately, the means by which Arnold attempts to establish acting chops in Maggie is a huge letdown. Borrowing a page from Ryan Gosling’s book, Schwarzenegger attempts to gain respectability mostly through aggressive, pensive silence. This sometimes works in more eccentrically shot films, but Maggie doesn’t have nearly enough going on visually or thematically to fill the void left by the absence of his usual charisma. The story the movie tells is somberly thin, focusing on Arnold’s caretaking of his teenage daughter as she slowly turns into a flesh-eating zombie. There’s some metaphors at work there about the real life scenario of a parent cairng for their child during a life-ending illness, but that’s about it. The movie grimly coasts along on scenario alone, without much else to say or get excited about along the way.

The messed up part about my reaction here is that I had the exact opposite one with the recent zombie comedy Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead. With Wyrmwood, I found myself asking if the world really needed another straight-forward zombie apocalypse movie. With Maggie, I found myself wishing that we did have another straightforward zombie pic. Some of the movie’s best moments were when Arnold was killing zombies in hand-to-hand combat in a public restroom or confronting creepy undead children in the woods. Some of his interactions with his ailing daughter were interesting in concept, but felt more like a starting point for a journey that the film wasn’t interested in going on instead of a complete work. I’m not saying that Arnold should stick to hamming it up in mindless action flicks for the rest of his career (though I do greatly appreciate those); I just don’t think Maggie gave him nearly enough to do in the way of proving that he can do anything else. In fact, I don’t think Maggie gave anyone much of anything.

-Brandon Ledet

The Running Man (1987)

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In honor of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s induction into the WWE Celebrity Hall of Fame, it seemed appropriate to revisit 1987’s The Running Man, a pro-wrestling meets dystopian sci-fi film that helped cement the actor as a cultural icon.

Some action movies feature exploding heads, but few include them by the end of the opening credits. In this violent video game of a movie, human heads are not only exploded in the opening sequence, they’re also burned, shot, impaled and electrified later on. All of this head-squashing takes place around Ben Richards, a former soldier being framed for the deaths of innocent women & children, as he becomes an unwilling contestant on a sadistic gameshow. Richards must fight his way through a gauntlet of assassins (each with their own wrestling-friendly gimmick personas like Fireball, Buzzsaw, Dynamo and Subzero) as bloodthirsty spectators, including grandmothers and children, watch on eagerly. The dystopian hell of Running Man is set in 2017, but thankfully the game shows of today have not sunk to the depraved levels predicted in the film (if you don’t include Fear Factor).

The original host of Family Feud, Richard Dawson, plays the show’s sleazy, always inebriated host in a performance that doesn’t feel far removed from how Dawson himself acted on his real-life gameshow (where he shamelessly kissed & fondled contestants). Dawson chews the scenery every time he’s on-screen, but is just one of the many memorable cameos in the film. Mick Fleetwood, the infamous drummer for Fleetwood Mac, also makes an appearance as a coked out revolutionary. Then there’s the former governor of Minnesota & pro wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura as Captain Freedom, who pummels Richards inside a steel death cage in the film’s best scene. As well as being the best, the death cage scene is also the film’s most violent, because in Running Man the two are one in the same.

Truth is, although Arnold’s protagonist in the main attraction, The Running Man never feels like his film. Easily upstaged by the bigger personalities around him, Ben Richards is one of the weaker roles of Arnold’s career. For most of the film he is simply there, acting like a dick until he has to step into action and kill something. He does have a few good one-liners, though, like the Arnold staple “I’ll be back” and my personal favorite, “I’ll tell you what I think of it: I live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist because I’m going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!” Despite the one-liners, even María Conchita Alonso (as Arnold’s standard girl-he-kidnaps-who-then-falls-for-him) gives a fiery performance with what little room she is allowed, sometimes outshining Arnold’s.

According to Wikipedia, Arnold stated that the director “shot the movie like it was a television show, losing all the deeper themes.” He is right in that The Running Man never really delves into the social satire that was present in the 1982 Stephen King novel the film was based on. Instead, the film is highly entertaining because of its over-the-top violence, breakneck pacing, and great cameos. I doubt King is a fan of professional wrestling, but the film adaption of The Running Man is like an ultra-violent WrestleMania. Vince McMahon would approve even if King & Schwarzenegger didn’t.

-James Cohn