Last Action Hero - 1993 - 2 Stars

Actors:  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austin O'Brien
Director:  John McTiernan

Note:  Spoilers Ahead

If action films are like eating Doritos - sometimes delicious, never nutritious - Last Action Hero is like reading the ingredients of Doritos - incomprehensible and depressing.  This film is a solid deconstruction of the action genre and includes some excellent Naked Gun-style slapstick comedy and parody.  The trouble is, it gets all this out of the way in the first 45 minutes or so, leaving a leaden 85 minutes for this film to try our patience as it heaps one bizarre sequence on another.  The trouble with deconstructing an action film and then trying to have one is that what little tension action films generate is gone, and what's left is the intentionally bad and weird dialogue of an action film and action set pieces which no longer thrill or amuse.  There was probably a good movie in here - although hiring Schwarzenegger and giving him reams of dialogue is going to be tough sledding even with a better script - but the film tries to get us to care about these characters while flashing a neon sign above them at all times that says 'These are characters in a movie, which is fake'.  It doesn't work.

The Giant Mechanical Man - 2012 - 2 Stars

Actors:  Jenna Fischer, Chris Messina
Director:  Lee Kirk

There's a strange intersection between indie film and sitcom comedy - as sitcoms get more sophisticated and indie film gets more conversational, the twain have met and know one another.  This evolution has enabled indie films to generate more regular laughs, in the manner of a comedy, but has impacted characterization - sitcom-type characters carry far, far too much in this film.

This film has some very good performances and the writing is strong in places, but it relies on some worn out tropes.  If we want to make food analogies, and who doesn't, the sauce was quite good but it could not cover up the taste and texture of the meat.