Arnold Schwarzenegger

Raw Deal

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  • Title: Raw Deal
  • IMDb: link

Inarguably lesser Schwarzenegger, Flashback Friday takes us 40 years to 1986’s Raw Deal when Hollywood was still struggling with turning the former bodybuilder into a consistent blockbuster action star. Perhaps not surprisingly, throwing Arnold Schwarzenegger into the middle of a crime drama as a blackballed cop turned small town sheriff working undercover with the mob, with no sense of humor given the absurdity of such an idea, isn’t the most believable of scenarios.

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The Running Man

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  • Title: The Running Man (1987)
  • IMDb: link

Set in the distant future of 6 years ago, 1987’s The Running Man starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, an escaped convict and disgraced former police officer who was arrested for refusing to open fire on an unarmed mob in a totalitarian police state run by lies, propaganda, and brutal force that looks more and more prescient every day. Framed for the murders he refused to commit, Richard is tapped by Damon Killian (Richard Dawson), the host of the world’s most popular reality-TV game show, and forced into competing on The Running Man.

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Commando

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  • Title: Commando
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back 40 years to perhaps the most Schwarzenegger movie Arnold Schwarzenegger ever made. More than 20 years before Taken, Schwarzenegger stars as retired Special Forces Colonel John Matrix. After a precredit sequence showing several other former soldiers killed, and a goofy credit montage showing Matrix living it up in the woods as a stay-at-home dad, Matrix’s daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano) is kidnapped by an old enemy (Dan Hedaya) and an old friend (Vernon Wells) who plan to blackmail Matrix into committing an assassination. Matrix, however, has other ideas and begins killing his way back to his daughter.

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Predator

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  • Title: Predator
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back to the summer of 1987 and the team-up between director John McTiernan and and action star Arnold Schwarzenegger which gave us Predator. While I wouldn’t rank Predator as his best film, it’s certainly worthy to be in the discussion coming during the greatest stretch of his career between 1984 and 1991 when he starred in The Terminator, Commando, Predator, The Running Man, Twins, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 

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Terminator: Dark Fate

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  • Title: Terminator: Dark Fate
  • IMDb: link

Terminator: Dark Fate movie reviewThe latest desperate attempt to breathe new life into the franchise is awkwardly inconsistent while pushing a laudable girl power message through a mine field of a plot that often blows up in the actors’ faces. Knocking off John Connor in the pre-credit sequence (which apparently cures his mother’s cancer?) creates a new timeline for Terminator: Dark Fate in which Skynet never rose but an almost identical artificial intelligence with time-travelling robots (lamely named Legion) comes to power. Set in the present, a Terminator (Gabriel Luna) and an enhanced soldier (Mackenzie Davis) are sent back in time. The target is a young woman (Natalia Reyes) who will grow to fill the void left by John’s death.

Ignoring all events after T2, the new timeline allows for the return of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Skynet’s final Terminator now passing for human. Although it earns points for removing Terminator Salvation from continuity, the brain-melting Dark Fate is inferior in every way to Rise of the Machines which remains the only Terminator movie that thought out the lasting ramifications of time travel.

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