The Best Schwarzenegger Movie Isn't 'Terminator' or 'Predator'
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He goes by many names: Arnie, Ah-nuld, the Terminator, the Governator, the Austrian Oak, Conan the Republican, the Machine. But however one chooses to acknowledge Arnold Schwarzenegger, one can’t help acknowledging his importance in action movies from the 1980s all the way up to now.
And he's keeping busy, too. With the forthcoming release of Terminator: Dark Fate, Arnold is ready to dip his toes into the 2019 movie landscape that's already seen the release of what's now the highest-grossing movie of all time, and a number of crowd and critical favorites. Dark Fate finds Arnold returning to the franchise, along with James Cameron (as a producer) and Linda Hamilton (as Sarah Connor!) returning to the franchise for the first time since Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The movie's not out yet, but we've got hope that it could wind up snagging a strong spot on the list we've put together below.
What he’s less celebrated for is his dramatic work, the movies that don’t require him to swing around bazookas or machine guns, or to beat down bad guys. Arnold didn’t start out as Arnold, after all; Hollywood didn’t catch on to the awesome might of his charisma until a decade into his film career. It took time for him to become the T-800. In that time, he made gems, and since he’s stopped being the T-800 (insofar as he can ever really stop being the thing that made him a household name), he’s made others. Put on your best workout gear and get ready to do some bicep curls, ‘cause here it is: Men’s Health’s full ranking of every Schwarzenegger movie (excluding the truly minor stuff).
34. Dave, 1993, Himself
Here’s the pitch: Dave (Kevin Kline), a loser running a temp agency in D.C., is conscripted by the Secret Service into posing as the President of the U.S. of A. (also Kevin Kline) to cover up POTUS’ extramarital activities. Dave, you see, has a side hustle impersonating the president, which of course makes him the ideal candidate for the job. It’s a breezy enough film, charming and sweet like an Aero milk chocolate bar; call it “harmless,” really, because ultimately Dave functions as a two-hour respite from political reality, and it’s so lightweight that you’ll find yourself forgetting everything that happens in it even as you watch the thing unfold. It isn’t the worst movie on this list, not by far, but Arnold, playing Arnold, pops up for not even a minute to discourage Kline and a bunch of kids from eating donuts. There's a question as to whether Dave belongs here at all. But Arnold’s delightful enough in his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment that Dave demands inclusion, if only just.
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33. Hercules in New York, 1969, Hercules
So this is probably the worst movie on the list. Probably. Bad Schwarzenegger films get really bad, and if you’re now smirking and raising an eyebrow and saying, “Well, but Schwarzenegger has been in lots of bad movies!” you likely haven’t seen Hercules in New York, which makes trash like Sabotage and Red Sonja look like fine cinema. Be fair to Arnie: This is his first movie, shot when he was just in his 20s, roughly a decade and a half before he took the roles that helped make him a star in the 1980s. It’s Arnie before Arnie became Arnie. Hell, the movie doesn’t even credit him by his name, instead going with “Arnold Strong,” undoubtedly because “strong” is just a tad easier to say than “Schwarzenegger.” And the studio dubbed over him, too! Imagine this thing from Arnold’s point of view, and you can’t help feeling for the guy. Here’s his first starring role, his big break, and the powers that be crapped all over it. Tough way to get started in the industry. Maybe the film’s badness is a silver lining. Today, audiences don’t know about it. We’ve forgotten it. That means Schwarzenegger can forget about it, too.
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31. The Villain, 1979, Handsome Stranger
Five years after Blazing Saddles parodied the Western genre (while also serving as a functional Western), along comes Hal Needham’s The Villain, a movie of similar purpose but with none of Mel Brooks’ zany wit. It’s about as blatant a rip on Brooks as one might imagine, all Western tropes and stereotypes with no real sense of humor, and any humor it does have, it wears out within seconds. “I was named after my father,” Arnold says any time a character remarks on his very specific name: Handsome Stranger. It’s a fine gag, but Needham’s film runs it into the ground, much as it runs every single one of its jokes into the ground, and that’s assuming they land in the first place.
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30. Scavenger Hunt, 1979, Lars
The one joke accorded Schwarzenegger in this Michael Schultz screwball ensemble is, in all honesty, a pretty good one: In the biggest stretch of his career to date, Arnold plays a gym instructor whose sole role in the whole frigging movie is to knock Tony Randall out of a window with a single toss of a medicine ball. That’s it. It’s not a bad joke! It actually works, in large part thanks to Arnold’s large body and his unexpected comic timing, a gift he went on to make great use of over the course of his career. But the joke’s punchline signals the end of his time on the screen, so it’s kind of hard to rank Scavenger Hunt any higher. It doesn’t help that the movie is, in a word, crummy, two hours of scrubby craftsmanship that verges on homemade. As is so often the case, Arnold’s appearance here is a high point, but he’s not enough to hold the movie aloft.
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29. Red Sonja, 1985, Lord Kalidor
“What about Conan the Barbarian, but without any of the joy?” sums up the essence of Red Sonja pretty handily. Richard Fleischer’s 1985 sword-and-sorcery movie is ostensibly a follow-up to 1982’s Conan the Barbarian and 1984’s Conan the Destroyer, but producer Dino De Laurentiis couldn’t get his hands on the rights to the property, so the gang had to wing it and have Arnold play Kalidor, the supporting muscle to Brigitte Nielsen’s lead. That’d be fine if the film wasn’t such a slog. If you want to suck all the life out of a campy fantasy picture, keep all the camp intact but take the story way too seriously, as if you’re making a respectable movie rather than a movie where Nielsen fights an evil queen in one-piece swimsuit armor. Schwarzenegger called it the worst movie he ever made, and claimed he used it as a disciplinary measure for when his kids acted out. You think he’s kidding? Watch the movie for yourself, and you’ll see that one viewing alone is punishment enough.
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28. The Kid & I, 2005, Himself
Maybe ranking a movie made with such pure intentions this low is a one-way ticket to hell. The Kid & I’s best recommendation is found in the stuff of its production. Tom Arnold produced this movie on behalf of his neighbors, Alec Gores and his son Eric, who has cerebral palsy and whose favorite film happens to be True Lies. In The Kid & I, Arnold’s washed-up actor character gets a gig making a True Lies rip-off. Art and life bleed over into each other a bit, which is theoretically interesting; also theoretically interesting is Penelope Spheeris (director of Wayne’s World, Suburbia, and all three chapters of The Decline of Western Civilization), who can’t do anything with Arnold’s writing or mine meaning out of the kindhearted but nepotistic motivation driving the shoot. Schwarzenegger’s barely in the movie at all, appearing alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, both playing themselves for no reason other than fan service. They’re both better off that way.
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27. Sabotage, 2014, Agent John "Breacher" Wharton
There’s a lot wrong with Sabotage that has nothing to do with Schwarzenegger—chiefly its direction, courtesy of Suicide Squad patsy David Ayer. But as Schwarzenegger films go, it’s shockingly inert given its absurd level of violence combined with its obvious and uncomfortable fondness for its absurd level of violence. Describing movie violence as “fetishistic” is its own kind of fetish, but the action of Sabotage slogs. Arterial spray isn’t enough; every action sequence is grindingly unpleasant with no real payoff. It's a weird sort of flex from Ayer, perhaps meant to show everybody that he has chops behind the camera while unwittingly betraying his limits as a director. Sabotage isn’t a good movie. It’s not even a good Schwarzenegger movie, even though he’s clearly trying to be good. The structure of the film built around him lets him down.
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26. The Expendables, 2010; The Expendables 2, 2012; The Expendables 3, 2014, Trent "Trench" Mauser
Why Arnold Schwarzenegger of all people would take on paycheck gigs as trite as the Expendables franchise is a mystery mankind may never satisfactorily answer. If someone ever invents time travel, send an envoy to before 2010 to warn Arnie off of this project. Each movie is built on the worst, or at least the most exhausting, fan service, where each action cinema icon takes turns winking and nudging one another by way of references to the franchises they’re known for. Groan. Schwarzenegger’s here entirely for the Expendables’ central novelty act of watching dudes like Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis, and Jet Li pal around, but it's never supported by substance. Schwarzenegger is as Schwarzenegger does, but if you want to honor the man’s legend, just watch one of the movies that got him cast in The Expendables in the first place instead.
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25. End of Days, 1999, Jericho Cane
A good educational tool for Schwarzenegger scholars, and not much else, End of Days is the first time Arnold really took a crack at looking disheveled, beaten down, and totally helpless, going far off his normal turf as an indestructible man of action. That’s an experiment with merit, but End of Days has nothing else going for it, which basically means that the experiment is a colossal failure. How do you screw this up? It’s the damn Terminator going one-on-one with Satan. That movie sells itself. But End of Days barely even managed that, coming in with a box-office take that just qualifies as “profitable” without actually being all that profitable in the long run. Part of the problem may be that nobody on the screen has a good grasp on what kind of film they’re in; Schwarzenegger way undersells himself while Gabriel Byrne, playing the Devil himself, goes off the rails. It’s a curious disaster, but that doesn’t make it fun to sit through.
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24. Aftermath, 2017, Roman Melnyk
If your concept of Arnold Schwarzenegger as an actor draws solely from his action iconography—his movies’ ridiculous body counts, his one-liners, his physique—then you probably watched Aftermath and thought, “Huh! Who knew that Schwarzenegger could really act?” The thing is, Schwarzenegger spent decades proving his acting chops in far better movies than Aftermath, a project that frankly doesn’t benefit from his casting in any meaningful way. The revenge element, in which bereaved husband and father Roman seeks apology from the air traffic controller responsible for the mid-air collision that took his family's lives, sounds like an arc fit for a Terminator, but the film is one of those “based on real events” joints. Schwarzenegger is ill at ease in a film that comprises reality. Watching him struggle through his character is, in a heartbreaking way, fascinating, but he doesn’t quite belong. His miscasting is a greater offense than Elliott Lester’s limp, lifeless direction.
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23. Collateral Damage, 2002, Cpt. Gordon "Gordy" Brewer
Nothing wrong with a good ol’ goofy Arnold actioner, except for, well, this good ol’ goofy Arnold actioner. This is the rare movie where Arnold himself holds back; maybe it’s just outsider’s perception, but from start to finish, his head’s not in Collateral Damage. This could be a case of real life smothering the filmmaking: Collateral Damage landed in theaters not long before Schwarzenegger sought office in California for the first time, and not long after 9/11 made us all nervous to fly or travel near densely populated city centers. (In point of fact, 9/11 led to a delay on the film’s release.) Either the movie or Arnold had other things on their mind than kick-ass American macho antics, because Collateral Damage, considering its star pedigree, is about as standard as action cinema gets. Taken alongside Arnold’s status as action royalty, “standard” translates to “straight-up frustrating.”
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22. Killing Gunther, 2017, Robert "Gunther" Bendik
Imagine, if you like, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde’s Man Bites Dog, not a very good movie to begin with, but filtered through Saturday Night Live, and you more or less have Taran Killam’s Killing Gunther. The idea’s fine enough: A crew of hit persons, including Killam as well as Bobby Moynihan and Hannah Simone, team up to bring down the top dog of all contract killers, Gunther, only for Gunther to foil them at every turn. He really is that good. Problem is, the movie’s not, and Gunther is hardly even in it, which means Schwarzenegger is hardly in it, which means that you need more reason to hang with the movie beyond his appearance in its last half-hour. Is a little Arnold still good Arnold? It can be. But Killing Gunther has too little Arnold, and it’s an embarrassing movie even when he does show his face.
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21. Jingle All the Way, 1996, Howard Langston
Truth time, gang: There’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure, for if it pleases you to watch a film, there’s nothing to feel guilty about. But let’s entertain the guilty pleasure as an aesthetic. If we do, Jingle All the Way qualifies, and it’s not even a question: This movie sucks, but in its particular suckitude it’s bafflingly watchable. Maybe it’s the joy of watching Arnold get outsmarted by Sinbad at every possible turn. Maybe it’s the deranged delight of Arnold getting blotto with a reindeer. Maybe it’s the bonkers-in-a-family-movie-sort-of-way Santa Claus fight scene, kind of a pre-Matrix Reloaded Burly Brawl but with an army of Saint Nicks and the Terminator. It’s a cheesy movie. It’s a half-baked movie. It’s a movie made with craft that barely measures up to “adequate.” But it’s a movie you’ll put into rotation at Christmastime every year without hesitation.
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20. Batman & Robin, 1997, Dr. Victor Fries/Mr. Freeze
If your dad was a supervillain, he'd be Mr. Freeze, which means your dad would be Arnold Schwarzenegger, which he almost certainly is not, though it’s pretty fun to imagine what that would be like. (Would he be the cool parent, or would he be the one who makes you do your homework, brush your teeth, and eat your vegetables at a time in your life when you cannot appreciate how damn good vegetables are?) That thought exercise aside, there’s no denying that Mr. Freeze is the king of dad jokes in comic-book movie history. Back in 1997, when Joel Schumacher dropped Batman & Robin on the world like a neutron bomb of awfulness, Schwarzenegger’s performance gave critics a convenient scapegoat for their (justifiable) contempt for the movie. Allowing for harsh words on how bad Batman & Robin actually is (in a word: atrocious), its problems have less to do with Schwarzenegger specifically and more with the production holistically. Basically, Schwarzenegger’s the only one who gets to do anything fun, like drop cheesy puns about ice and dinosaurs.
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19. Junior, 1994, Dr. Alexander "Alex" Hesse
For many, Junior boils down to four words: “My body, my choice.” That line defines the movie. It’s the anchor keeping Junior affixed in popular culture, not necessarily meant to flatter the film—it is, after all, a comedy where Schwarzenegger plays a scientist, and if that’s not unbelievable enough, he plays a scientist who gets knocked up—but more to skewer it and memorialize its absurd one-joke premise. But hey: Twins had a one-joke premise, too, and Twins is pretty all right. Junior’s nowhere near as good (and Twins is only good in the way many hacky goofball '80s comedies are good), but it’s a wonderful showcase for Arnold’s sense of timing. Being as timing is everything in comedy, Junior, in the rearview, feels like more proof (if more proof is needed) of Schwarzenegger’s star quality. He can knock a dude out with his fist, and he can knock an audience out with laughter. Double threat.
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18. Escape Plan, 2013, Emil Rottmayer / Victor X Mannheim
There’s a neat little moment in Mikael Håfström’s Escape Plan where Emil Rottmayer, an Austrian banker trapped in a remote private prison, fakes a psychotic break to distract guards long enough for his fellow inmate to get into some prison-breaking shenanigans. Emil screams. He cries. He starts babbling in Austrian. It’s a special beat in Schwarzenegger’s history: We’re always keenly aware of his background, but it’s not often that his background is brought into a film’s foreground. In Escape Plan, that dynamic helps this particular scene sing, and the weight of Schwarzenegger’s micro-performance carries over elsewhere into an otherwise basic movie about two guys, uh, hatching a plan to escape. Honestly, the real point of the exercise here is getting Schwarzenegger into the frame with his costar and fellow '80s action star Sylvester Stallone, but being as their union here led to that great breakdown Arnold stages, it’s a net positive.
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16. Kindergarten Cop, 1990, Det. John Kimble
Watching your favorite action hero get his ass handed to him by a bunch of kids who don’t even measure up to his waistline might not be your idea of a good time, but quite frankly, that scenario may well be Arnold at his most pure. Arnold’s fans care about his macho image. No one can speak for Arnold but Arnold, but it’s a pretty good bet that he doesn’t give half a damn about that image at all, at least not so much that he won’t play around with it or trade on it for the sake of a good physical gag. The key to Kindergarten Cop is that it needs Schwarzenegger, but Schwarzenegger, a big huge Hollywood deal after the time he had in the '80s, didn’t really need Kindergarten Cop. But he took the role anyway, and judging by his performance, he loved it. How can you not get behind that level of dedication and obvious personal enjoyment? One moment he’s screaming at a bunch of tykes. The next he’s introducing them to his pet ferret. That’s adorable.
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15. Red Heat, 1988, Cpt. Ivan Danko
When you make one great buddy-cop comedy, and when that buddy-cop comedy turns out to be so great that it effectively reinvents the buddy-cop subcategory, well, no one would blame you for making yet another buddy-cop movie, right? Right. Mostly. Red Heat has its issues; the movie reeks of its era’s politics. But that aside, Red Heat is terrific, exactly what you’d expect from a technician like Walter Hill, he of 48 Hrs., a guy with a no-nonsense aesthetic and an absolutely stellar sense for incongruous comic pairings. Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy, then Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi. They’re perfect foils for each other: Belushi the wise-ass American detective, Schwarzenegger the iron-jawed straight man. Timing, again is everything here, and that’s the key to the relationship between the two.
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14. Eraser, 1996, U.S. Marshal John Kruger
Eraser’s great claim to fame is that it’s a solid Schwarzenegger film. No more, no less. Part of its importance in his filmography, and part of what makes it so good, is when it lands: after Last Action Hero, when Schwarzenegger’s star power just couldn’t help him open a movie worth a damn leading. It’s the last worthwhile Arnie film up to The Last Stand (the corny delights of Batman & Robin aside). And it really is worthwhile, nothing special next to the great entries on his résumé, but a handsome example of what makes Arnie movies Arnie movies all the same. No more Mr. Nice Arnold: The action’s a gas, and he even gets a few choice one-liners here. (“You’re luggage!”) It can’t stand up to the Total Recalls and Terminators, but as mid-tier Schwarzenegger goes, Eraser satisfies.
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13. Twins, 1988, Julius Benedict
It’s amazing how, even after 1976, Schwarzenegger could skate by on his farm-boy charms and earnestness, and make a crummy movie decent and a decent movie surprisingly watchable just by being himself. Twins falls between these designations; it’s the kind of schlocky 1980s comedy that winks and yucks and hams it up before taking a sharp turn for the sentimental toward the end, except the movie stars Schwarzenegger as a fluffy riff on his action-star persona. Julius Benedict is a very good boy, basically a golden retriever in human form. All he wants is for his brother, Vincent (Danny DeVito), to love him. He wants to find their mother and ask why she abandoned him, because (surprise) he just wants her to love him, too. The whole exercise is goofy as hell, but Schwarzenegger is winning enough, and DeVito slimy enough, that Twins works against expectations.
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12. Raw Deal, 1986, Sheriff Mark Kaminsky / Joseph P. Brenner
There’s an alternate universe out there where behind the lens, Raw Deal wound up getting, well, a raw deal. In that universe, the movie’s a potboiler from top to bottom, made by only borderline-competent technical types to keep down on expenses. But we don’t live in that universe. We live in the universe where Raw Deal was shot by Alex Thomson, whose résumé features names like Nicolas Roeg, Michael Cimino, Michael Mann, David Fincher, and John Boorman; edited by the legendary Anne V. Coates, known best for Lawrence of Arabia; and written by Norman Wexler, responsible for the screenplays of Saturday Night Fever and Serpico. How Raw Deal wound up with this much pedigree in its corner is a bizarre mystery that probably has something or other to do with producer Dino De Laurentiis, but hey, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth: Raw Deal has way more artistic merit than it needs to or even deserves (so much, in fact, that Arnold’s casting is superfluous compared to the hands involved with putting the movie together in the first place).
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11. Last Action Hero, 1993, Det. Jack Slater / Himself
If Total Recall wasn’t a thing, Last Action Hero might hold higher esteem in the Schwarzenegger canon; they’re more or less of a piece, as self-aware action movies made by great craftsman intent on dissecting and also skewering the very conventions they’re openly indulging. But there’s a big difference between the two: Total Recall is a stone-cold masterpiece, and Last Action Hero is just “good,” or, in the spirit of generosity, “probably better than you remember it being.” Like Total Recall, it’s self-reflective. Like Total Recall, it uses genre cliche for fun and profit and even plot. Unlike Total Recall, it’s made by John McTiernan, who knows how to make an amazing action movie (see: Die Hard, and other entries on this list, y’know), but doesn’t quite have a handle on the kind of thing Last Action Hero is trying to accomplish. (It doesn’t help that watching the movie lends this unshakeable sense that other folks kept trying to get their hands on the wheel while McTiernan was trying to steer.) What the film does do well is capture and dramatize the love of action as a genre; it’s a celebration of things going “boom” and an ode to Arnold’s legend.
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10. The Running Man, 1987, Benjamin "Ben" Richards
Three decades ago, critics took The Running Man out to the woodshed. Now they all look like assholes. It’s not uncommon to see yesteryear’s movies reevaluated over time and given new life and appreciation by later generations (or by the previous generation’s more thoughtful arbiters), but reviewers got The Running Man very wrong the first time around. Let’s get fancy and call it prescient: Paul Michael Glaser’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 novel not only predicts the advent of TV’s poisonous influence on pop culture, it specifically informs movies, ranging from Battle Royale to The Hunger Games, made long after its initial release in 1987. King set the novel in 2025. Glaser’s screenwriter, Steven E. de Souza, pushed the date back to 2017, the year of a global economic collapse that led to the U.S.’s transformation into a police state. As serious as The Running Man’s premise is, The Running Man itself is willfully silly, loaded with one-liners and action that verges on the absurd. But the silliness has a way of selling the seriousness, and thus selling the satire.
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9. Conan the Barbarian, 1982; Conan the Destroyer, 1984, Conan
You can take your pick over Schwarzenegger roles that best define Schwarzenegger as a movie star or as a person. His work is littered with contributions to action-movie iconography. But if you tend to think of Schwarzenegger as a big, musclebound beefcake with little to offer humanity beyond the circumference of his biceps, then your go-to Arnie movie is probably Conan the Barbarian, or its considerably lesser sequel, Conan the Destroyer. (The latter’s saving grace is its immense GIF-ability, but that’s really not much of a plus.) Stick with the original, not only the sire of its own sequel but the progenitor of that very short-lived fantasy epic boom in the 1980s, assuming you consider that a good thing and not an embarrassment best forgotten.
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8. The Last Stand, 2013, Sheriff Ray Owens
Should you find yourself in the mood for an Arnold Schwarzenegger that functions as a series of nods to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career and also doesn’t insult your taste and intellect, try giving Kim Jee-woon’s excellent The Last Stand a watch. Kim doesn’t try to reinvent the Arnie wheel, but he’s also a disciplined filmmaker, not one to get lazy and lean on referential drudgery to score a few cheap pops from his audience. Arnie fans will be happy just to see him in a movie, to say nothing of a movie directed with brisk, loony energy by one of South Korea’s best genre filmmakers. Helming The Last Stand, a tale of big crime in a small town watched over by Schwarzenegger’s guilty and world-weary sheriff, Kim contents himself letting Arnold be Arnold with no other pretense. Rather than reference Arnold’s movies, he references some of his own and generally has a great time doing it. The best part? His star has a great time indulging him, and turns out the best performance in his 2010s revival.
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7. True Lies, 1994, Agent Harry Tasker / Harry Renquist
Depending on your vantage point, True Lies has either aged poorly or remarkably well for a movie of its era. In 2018, productions as blatantly racist and homophobic as this are rightly unfashionable, and for that matter, can you even imagine a movie about a government spy blackmailing his own wife into becoming a prostitute getting a greenlight today? (Scratch that last one. The answer’s still likely “yes.”) But even problematic faves still have merit as entertainment, and entertainment’s where True Lies thrives. If you can stomach the bad optics, and if you can buy the central premise—that a guy like Schwarzenegger could work as a spy and hide his vocation from his family without ever raising even a whiff of suspicion—then you’re in for a nice, larky ride, a product of its time that knows how to party. It’s about as basic as they come in Arnold’s filmography, but everyone needs to chow down on meat and potatoes once in a while.
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6. Maggie, 2015, Wade Vogel
Wade Vogel’s weepy zombie flick Maggie doesn’t ask much of Schwarzenegger, but he delivers more, which is good since Vogel doesn’t have a whole lot to give himself. Maggie, in case it’s not already clear, isn’t a great movie, just a decent one, too listless to uphold the promise of its basic conceit. Wade (Schwarzenegger) finds his daughter, Maggie (Abigail Breslin), zombie-bitten in post-zombie pandemic America; he brings her home, though she left in the first place to protect him and the rest of her family, to take care of her, knowing full well the danger he courts by just being near her. It’s a heartbreaking idea, lessened by the absence of momentum. All things considered, Maggie goes nowhere. Its stakes never amount to anything. But it’s beautiful, in a grim, washed-out sort of way, and Schwarzenegger is legitimately devastating as a man torn in two by the inevitable demise of his daughter. Burying your child is one kind of horror. Knowing when you’re going to have to bury her is worse. Maggie might be stuck in place, but Schwarzenegger understands the grim truth at its center.
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5. Commando, 1985, Col. John Matrix
For one group of people, Commando may well come down to its one-liners, as do so many of Arnie’s movies. For another group, Commando comes down to a 40-second gear-up montage, where John Matrix rows ashore an empty beach in naught but his Speedos and then, in several blinks of the human eye, clothes himself, carefully knots his boots, arms himself to the teeth, and paints himself with camo stripes. You think John’s an efficient soldier? He’s even more efficient at getting dressed. You ever hit up a party with this guy, you can rest easy knowing that you won’t be late because he’s taking too long to pick out and put on an outfit. That’s military discipline exemplified. Granted, he might leave the party a smoldering ruin, but at least you’ll be on time.
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4. Predator, 1987, Major Alan "Dutch" Schaefer
Gather together a crowd of action die-hards, and each of them will have their own favorite '80s action star, whether Stallone, Willis, Chow Yun-fat, Jackie Chan, Jean Claude Van Damme, or Schwarzenegger. But from any objective sense, Schwarzenegger has an edge over all of them thanks to Predator, where he goes toe-to-toe with Kevin Peter Hall as one of sci-fi’s greatest monsters; none of Arnie’s contemporaries can claim that kind of awesome accomplishment. “But Die Hard is the greatest action movie of all time!” you say. And you know what? You’re right. But Predator, John McTiernan’s pre-Die Hard warm-up, is every bit as dizzying a spectacle and proof of both his skill as an action maestro and Schwarzenegger’s presence. Even when dwarfed by Hall, he fills up the screen.
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3. The Terminator, 1984, T-800 "Model 101"; Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991, T-800 "Model 101"; Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 2003, T-850 "Model 101"; Terminator Genisys, 2015, T-800 "Model 101"
Given a little thought, Terminator is the perfect metaphor for Schwarzenegger: Like the T-800, he’s an implacable brawny machine who absolutely will not stop until he fulfills his mission. The key difference is that Schwarzenegger just wants to wow your socks clean off your ankles. He doesn’t want to kill you, though if you hang out with him long enough, chances are you’ll accidentally get blown up or crushed by a tank. That’s the risk you take hanging out with the Governator.
Yuks aside, the Terminator films, for better and for worse, are likely the most defining films of Schwarzenegger’s body of work; the image of the shades-wearing, leather-clad cyborg, striding without end toward his target. There’s a transgressive “cool” factor to the Terminator figure: He looks like a rebel badass. True, he’s a tool of oppression in the first movie, but his turn through the rest of the series lets him earn the distinction his outfit affords him. The quality of Terminators after the first two (arguably three, if you feel like fighting) drops tremendously, but decades later, the cool remains.
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2. Stay Hungry, 1976, Joe Santo
Here it is: The best evidence available that Arnold can, in fact, act. Much like its protagonist, a mopey well-heeled Southern boy and inveterate loafer, Stay Hungry isn’t ambitious. Rather, it’s unapologetically carefree, the film equivalent of bobbing down a river on a summer’s day, lazing on an inner tube without a worry in your heart or any plan in mind other than pursuit of nirvana by way of inertia. The Southern boy is played by Jeff Bridges, youthful but still possessed of that trademark Bridges roguishness; he’s supported first by Sally Fields, free-spirited and completely allergic to nonsense, and second by Arnold, playing an equally free-spirited bodybuilder with the life goal of winning the Mr. Universe title. Schwarzenegger embodies chummy convivial warmth; he’s everyone’s friend. Whether he’s lifting weights or shredding on the fiddle, he’s a vision of good cheer, a magnetic field of joy you’re happily caught in.
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1. Total Recall, 1990, Douglas "Doug" Quaid / Carl Hauser
The film The Last Action Hero wishes it could be. Also: not the film anyone thinks it is, or thought it was. By now Total Recall’s quality of satire is well-known; it’s a clever, and well-masked, send-up of action cinema, a demonstration of how action films numb our senses and melt our brains. Maybe one could argue, assuming one is willing, that a guy like Schwarzenegger doesn’t suit that conceit particularly well, given that he’s the action star, a man whose influence over the genre’s evolution is as grand as it is undeniable. But that’s exactly what makes him so perfect for Total Recall’s merciless parody. The movie needs Schwarzenegger to be himself, and to give a full demonstration of the archetype he helped shape. It has Schwarzenegger at his wide-eyed best, a man unmoored from reality as he knows it and desperate to find his footing. It’s a wild bit of entertainment, an all-timer among spoofs, and the best Schwarzenegger has ever been.
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