Last Action Hero was supposed to be another massive Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. It wasn't.

Instead, it became one of the more famous box-office disappointments of the ’90s.

Which is unfortunate, because it’s considerably more fun than its reputation suggests.

Arnold plays Jack Slater, an indestructible movie cop who exists inside exactly the kind of ridiculous action movie Arnold himself was famous for making. A kid named Danny gets pulled into Slater’s world, where cars explode constantly, cops are caricatures, and basically every rule of reality has been replaced by movie logic.

The best part is that Arnold is completely in on the joke.

He spends much of the movie making fun of his own screen persona and the action genre that made him famous, while Charles Dance gives the movie an actual villain worth watching.

It’s too long and not every joke works, but the concept is much smarter than the movie’s reputation would suggest. More than 30 years later, Last Action Hero feels less like a failed blockbuster and more like an action comedy that showed up before audiences quite knew what to do with it.

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A notorious flop that was one of Arnold’s more entertaining movies.