Last Action Hero.

Perhaps too many years of movie reviewing have turned my brain to mush but it seems to me that the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The Last Action Hero, is a witty and well-crafted film. Its basic idea is taken from Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, but that's all right; director John McTiernan and his scriptwriters add to what they steal.

A little boy uses a magic charm to enter the latest movie of his celluloid hero, Jack Slade, played by Arnold. Instead of being bewildered, the kid, a veteran moviegoer, knows exactly what's going to happen and how to handle himself. He can't take too many risks because he's only the comic sidekick and, after all, comic sidekicks are sometimes killed off. Slade, of course, is invulnerable, but he's bewildered by this boy who insists that Slade and his whole world are nothing but pop fiction. Slade feels his own reality but the boy keeps producing evidence to the contrary. How does he know that Slade's FBI agent pal is really a slimeball? That's easy. The agent is played by F. Murray Abraham and didn't he kill Mozart in Amadeus? Then the boy tests Slade by writing down the "f" word and daring his hero to say it out loud. Why can't Slade bring himself to do it? That's also easy. Slade lives inside a PG-13 film world and PG-13 doesn't permit the "f" word. But when the little inquisitor adduces as further evidence that there are no unattractive women in Slade's existence, the muscleman has the perfect rebuttal: "Of course not. This is California!"

McTiernan, who made Die Hard, may not have Spielberg's finesse, but he knows the genre he's parodying and he's good at giving the action movie gambits just the nudge they need to turn them into the stuff of farce. Sometimes, though, it's more than a nudge, as when the villain (played with wonderful saturnine self-mockery by Charles Dance) warns Slade that his growling attack dogs are "quite well-trained," then snaps his fingers. The dogs immediately leap into pyramid formation. At moments like these, Action Hero invades the territory of Airplane! and Naked Gun.

The movie's energy flags only in its last quarter, and this seems to be because the moviemakers are afraid to shift gears. The plot has Slade and the boy leave the celluloid world to pursue the villain into real life where bullets can really hurt action heroes. But, though Slade concedes that breaking a window now hurts his hand, he pretty much carries on as before. What was needed here was a sharp, comic-pathetic deflation, with Schwarzenegger being flung up against a reality where muscles and wisecracks can only go so far. But the moviemakers have too much money riding on this project to stop Arnold from being Arnold. And so the gunfire, the shattering of glass, the thud and thump and kapow never let up. Witty and well-made as so much of Last Action Hero is, it finally exhausts rather than exhilarates.

Big Fun must strain to keep on being Big Fun even when just a small dose of conviction would carry the day.