Arnold Schwarzenegger. Today, he is known a veteran of blockbuster movies, a road-tested icon in his own right with nearly 80 acting credits to date. He has played robots, cops, soldiers, dads, ancient warriors, and in one notable instance, a comic book villain. Schwarzenegger has crafted for himself a career unlike any other movie star to date, filling his resumé with a variety of roles that invite us to ponder modern masculinity onscreen and what that can look like in all of its forms. Schwarzenegger has found success as both an action star and a comedy star, with the occasional performance toeing the line between these two comfort zones and eliciting intriguing results.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of his best movies, 1990's Kindergarten Cop, I've rounded up all of Schwarzenegger's movies made in the '90s and ranked them. The rankings are based primarily on Schwarzenegger's performance but the quality of the movie also factors in here. In revisiting Schwarzenegger's '90s movies, it becomes clear that this is the decade where his star persona is cemented, his status as a box office-approved A-lister is cemented, and he is an actor unafraid of taking big swings with the roles he signed on for — for better and for worse.
11. The Cameos: Beretta's Island (1993) & Dave (1993)
At the bottom of this ranking are two cameos Schwarzenegger made in feature films Beretta's Island and Dave. Beretta's Island is an action-comedy that sees a retired Interpol officer take down a drug lord. The movie stars Franco Columbu, a lifelong friend of Schwarzenegger's who has known the actor since their early days as bodybuilders. As such, it should come as no surprise that Schwarzenegger's brief cameo involves the men talking shop while they're pumping iron together. As for Dave, one of the four movies in the Ivan Reitman-Schwarzenegger comedy run, the actor appears in one scene as himself extolling the virtues of not eating donuts while presidential stand-in Dave Kovic (Kevin Kline) makes funny. While both cameos are interesting entries in Schwarzenegger's resumé — primarily because they both occur at a point where he really doesn't need to be making cameos in anything — neither are so outstanding that they could beat out any of the other films he made in the decade.
10. End of Days (1999)
Technically, End of Days is a genre-heavy blend of action, fantasy, and horror. Technically. But watching End of Days is another matter entirely because you'll find yourself trying to stifle laughter the entire way through. As a movie, it is a misfire. As a showcase of Schwarzenegger's acting abilities, it's a huge misfire.
In End of Days, Schwarzenegger plays Jericho, an ex-cop who is laid low by the murders of his wife and daughter and numbs his depression with alcohol. Jericho is roped into a hunt for Satan (Gabriel Byrne), who has appeared Earth-side in search of the woman (Robin Tunney) who will give birth to the Antichrist and bring about the end of the world. If you're not rolling your eyes by this point, color me very surprised.
Schwarzenegger is all wrong for End of Days, plain and simple. It's easy to understand that an actor would sign on to the movie because the character of Jericho offers enough layers of intensity to present an enticing challenge to portray. But Schwarzenegger has never worked in this desperately grim, genre-driven vein and that fact is very clear as you watch this movie. Ultimately, what Schwarzenegger turns in as Jericho rings hollow and only makes End of Days a bummer to watch.
9. Jingle All the Way (1996)
Jingle All the Way is a completely unhinged movie. If we weren't measuring it against other Schwarzenegger movies, it might rank higher. But Jingle All the Way is fighting against some pretty stiff competition here and so it must be saddled with a sucky slot.
The 1996 Christmas movie sees Schwarzenegger playing workaholic suburban dad Howard Langston. As Christmas draws near, Howard is trying to make up for once again missing an important event in his son Jamie's (Jake Lloyd) life. To make up for it, Howard swears he to his wife (Rita Wilson) that he's gotten Jamie the highly-covered Turbo-Man doll — a toy that is harder to find than Jimmy Hoffa's body. Naturally, Howard hasn't bought the doll and handles buying it like a college freshman writing a term paper: looking all over metropolitan Minneapolis for this ungettable toy in the final hours before Christmas.
A handful of Schwarzenegger's previous movies — think Twins in the '80s or even Kindergarten Cop from earlier in the '90s — have proven he's not afraid to be a total goofball or play noble family man caught up in extraordinary circumstances. But where Schwarzenegger thrived in those other movies, he seems to be asleep at the wheel in Jingle All the Way. The movie has ingested one too many candy canes and is on some perverse sugar high (don't you dare get me started on whatever Sinbad is doing in this movie) and yet Schwarzenegger seems to be flat, going through the motions, and unable to match the energy of what's happening around him.
8. Eraser (1996)
1996's Eraser is perhaps the most okayest action movie Schwarzenegger made in the '90s. But not even the power of futuristic guns, Vanessa Williams as Arnie's co-star, or a villainous James Caan could save this doddering dud from a low ranking on this list.
Eraser is a fairly standard action movie premise. Schwarzenegger plays U.S. Marshal John "The Eraser" Kruger (cue the air guitars), a top agent for the Witness Protection program who succeeds in literally erasing people from the face of the planet and getting them settled into new identities. The movie even takes time to prove this with an elaborate opening scene involving Kruger barging into a house where a mobster and his wife are being held at gunpoint by other mobsters and Kruger helps puts fake bodies meant to be the couple in the house, kills the bad guys, and then explodes the entire house as the trio peel off. Anyway, Kruger basically has to protect Lee Cullen (Williams), the former employee of a defense contractor who has stolen information about high tech weapons and is now a target.
On paper, Schwarzenegger's character and the story sound like a promising action-thriller. What actually lives onscreen is a surprisingly bland, aimless movie that occasionally jolts you upright with some interesting action setpieces. But Eraser feels too giddy playing with its high tech weaponry and CGI toys to focus on telling a story that gives something meaningful for Schwarzenegger and Williams, who really is wasted here, much to do. There is no doubt that Schwarzenegger is a stellar action star and when he's got the right material, he shines. Eraser is just doesn't have the right material.
7. Junior (1994)
Of all the Reitman-Schwarzenegger team-ups, 1994's Junior is the biggest swing and the biggest miss. This is the last time the Ghostbusters director worked with Schwarzenegger following Twins, Kindergarten Cop, and Dave. Generally, Reitman and Schwarzenegger have proven to be a solid pairing, with Reitman innately understanding how to use Schwarzenegger's muscular, macho presence to comedic effect and Schwarzenegger not only meeting Reitman's needs, but using his special toolkit to tailor his performance so it surpasses them. Schwarzenegger has been in enough comedies by this point to show us that he is game to be a funny guy, but there is something special about the magic that happens when he's working under Reitman's direction where his true abilities as a comedian really shine through.
In light of this, Junior is an odd duck. More than 25 years after its release, this is a comedy that has aged well in some ways and really weirdly in others. The story follows Alex Hesse (Schwarzenegger), a research geneticist who teams with fertility specialist Larry Arbogast (Danny DeVito) to do human testing of his new fertility drug on himself. The fellas decide to try and mimic a pregnancy in Alex's body but this get complicated when Alex decides he wants to keep the baby and carry it to term.
Junior occasionally succeeds it taking a progressive attitude toward pregnancy and motherhood. Emma Thompson's arc as the workaholic scientist who freezes her eggs so she can be a mother on her own terms remains an authentic and endearing arc to engage with. Similarly, allowing Schwarzenegger to explore tenderness by playing a man experiencing pregnancy is an intriguing acting challenge to put him through. But when the movie exploits it's high concept premise of "Get a load of this guy — he's pregnant!" Junior flails in regressive waters. Among the most baffling of sequences is when Alex dresses as a woman and escapes to a retreat for expectant mothers. The gender politics of Junior become muddled as the movie tries to turn the situation of Alex, who is blatantly male-presenting, trying to pass for a woman as pure comedy. In the end, Junior buckles under the pressure of sticking to high-concept comedy and fails to lean into the more genuine, honest aspects of the story it's telling.
6. True Lies (1994)
True Lies is an interesting entry in Schwarzenegger's creative partnership with writer/director James Cameron. A remake of the French film La Totale!, True Lies asks us, "Can the Schwarzenegger-Cameron action movie dynamic thrive when it's not dealing with time-traveling robot mercenaries?" The answer is yeah, for the most part, it can.
Where Schwarzenegger and Cameron's previous team-ups on the first two Terminator movies was a more serious affair, True Lies sees the duo mixing in a little comedy with their action, leading to some fun and fresh results that still entertain more than two decades after its theatrical release. Cameron is a skilled action director, so it should come as no surprise that the big setpieces which help bulk out this movie to a whopping two hours and 21 minutes are fun enough to spend time with without feeling like you've strayed too far from the plot.
To this end, Schwarzenegger's performance in True Lies is an interesting one. It's clear he's game to have some fun as secret agent Harry Tasker, a boring family man by day and a suave spy by night. Harry goes off the deep end went he believes his wife, Helen (a most excellent Jamie Lee Curtis) is cheating on him with a used car salesman (an even more excellent Bill Paxton) and uses all of the spy capabilities he has to catch Helen out. Schwarzenegger's performance here feels perfunctory and a bit muted as he tries to find the right balance between comedy star and action hero. Where other actors can shine because their roles demand only a few notes of performance, Schwarzenegger has to play a broad range and stumbles, resulting in a standard performance that feels like he's playing it safe.
The weaker aspects of True Lies do stick out noticeably all these years later. Tom Arnold's egregiously sexist sidekick is a thorn in this movie's side. The disjointed feeling of the movie juggling the Tasker and Helen cheating plot with the terrorist organization action plot remains for a majority of the runtime and make it hard to find a groove as you watch. But even these knocks against True Lies don't detract from the fact that it is a fun outing for Schwarzenegger and Cameron, who surprises us with a non-franchise feature.
5. Total Recall (1990)
Director Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall is one of the zaniest movies Schwarzenegger has even appeared in. While I was revisiting Total Recall for this ranking, I wrote in my notes, "The special effects in this movie are absolutely insane." And in order to match the true insanity of Total Recall's campier sci-fi aspects, it's only natural that Schwarzenegger also ups the ante with his performance as Quaid, a blue-collar worker whose attempts at getting fake vacation memories from a company called Rekall backfire after the fake memories resurface actual memories of his life as a secret agent working on Mars.
To be clear, Schwarzenegger works really well in this zone. Total Recall is a satirical, campy comedy cloaked in a sci-fi action hard shell; it's candy for fans of either (or both) genre. Because Verhoeven loves to play with the spicy and the sweet in his movies, Total Recall sees Schwarzenegger go from, say, fighting his fake wife (Sharon Stone) in hand-to-hand combat in the dark to expressing disbelief that it's actually her. Or, you see Schwarzenegger's Quaid watch a video of himself in an abandoned warehouse and, after learning about his true identity, proceed to pull a comically large tracking device out through his nose — a shot that requires acting through prosthetics. Totall Recall gives Schwarzenegger the freedom to play things big while also doing cool spy bits, all in the 1990 vision of the year 2084. But Total Recall is also a lesser version of the kinds of better movies both Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger have made in their careers, like Starship Troopers and the Terminator movies.
4. Kindergarten Cop (1990)
This is where it starts to get good. Kindergarten Cop is a sincere delight — and highlight — in Schwarzenegger's resumé. By this point in both his career and this ranking, it should be evident that Schwarzenegger hasn't shied away from doing comedies. Our favorite muscle man loves to have a laugh! And I love that for him! Schwarzenegger is at his best as a comedic actor in Kindergarten Cop, flourishing under Reitman's direction and turning in a performance that blends the right amount of sweetness, silliness, and intensity.
In Kindergarten Cop, Schwarzenegger plays John Kimble, a tough-talking LAPD detective who is forced to go undercover as a kindergarten teacher in order to track down a drug dealer on the run. Why a kindergarten teacher, you ask? Because one of the kids at the rural Oregon elementary school where he's undercover is the son of the drug deal and Kimble has to figure out which kid it is. Charming hilarity ensues as we watch Schwarzenegger's Kimble try to deal with precocious four- and five-year-olds who seem both in awe of their hulking substitute teacher and unfazed by him.
Not only is Kindergarten Cop a movie that offers up such iconic outbursts as "It's not a too-mah!" from Kimble, but it also allows Schwarzenegger the chance to show he can be a nuanced, considerate performer who is comfortable showcasing vulnerability in the same movie he showcases strength. Kindergarten Cop is a new kind of comedy for Schwarzenegger, one which does have a high-concept premise but, crucially, a premise that is also fairly grounded and honest about the story it's telling. Schwarzenegger gamely rises to the challenges of playing a square peg in a round hole of a world and ultimately succeeds.
3.Batman & Robin (1997)
When I tell you that, to this day, 1997's Batman & Robin is a masterpiece, I mean it. We have seen a nauseatingly bountiful amount of Batman movies made over the years, but it's the Joel Schumacher entries — Batman Forever and Batman & Robin — that remain the most fascinating and exciting. Why? Because Schumacher seems to innately understand what it means to bring comic book characters to life on the big screen. Couple this with the colorful bombast of '90s movies which offer up action setpieces, costumes, and set design so unique you can practically see the toy versions of them springing up on Toys 'R Us shelves across America, and you've got a real treat on your hands.
We'll have to save our Batman Forever conversation for another time because Batman & Robin demands our attention. This is a movie that is notable for the fact that it barely seems interested in its titular heroes (George Clooney as Batman and Chris O'Donnell as Robin) and more focused on its villains, Mr. Freeze (Schwarzenegger) and Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman). When thinking about Schwarzenegger's career, what stands out is the fact that he rarely plays villains. As such, seeing Arnie play Freeze, a melancholy king who thrives in subzero temperatures and just wants to be reunited with his wife, is notable.
Schwarzenegger's performance as Freeze is the stuff of high camp — as a performance in a Schumacher flick of this size and spectacle demands — as well as the stuff of deep soulfulness. He really succeeds in selling us line readings like "Stay cool, bird boy!"(one of the many lines which feel pulled right out of the Adam West Batman TV show) while also making the intimate moments with his comatose wife who he cares for work well. Schwarzenegger has never played an over-the-top villain like Freeze before Batman & Robin, nor has he in the years since. It's a really fun vein to see him tap into. This is a memorable performance that adds even more color to Schwarzenegger's celebrity and actor persona.
2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1992)
Before the Terminator franchise went down a wild, twisted, frequently frustrating path, there was 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Arriving seven years after 1984's The Terminator, Terminator 2 saw the return of Schwarzenegger as the titular Terminator and Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor with Cameron once again in the director's chair. Terminator 2's story is a natural progression from the first movie, picking up 11 years later. By the time we rejoin Sarah Connor in her mission to prevent Skynet from bringing about the end of the world, she's locked up at a mental hospital while her son, the future revolutionary John Connor (Edward Furlong), is in foster care. Schwarzenegger's Terminator is sent back once again, this time to protect John Connor from being killed by a newer, sleeker Terminator model, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick).
For Schwarzenegger, his performance in Terminator 2 is deceptively complex. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the role, which requires him to perform like a piece of machinery feigning humanity, is the stuff of softball material. But, because this movie's Terminator is now required to protect John Connor rather than kill, Schwarzenegger gets to dig into giving this artificial intelligence an emotional arc. Over the course of the movie, we see the Terminator form a strong emotional bond with both John and Sarah. Moments like John teaching the Terminator the phrase, "Hasta la vista, baby," as well as early '90s slang foster charming, human interactions in a movie (and, broadly, a franchise) where the search for humanity is a tall order.
1. Last Action Hero (1993)
Coming in at #1 is Last Action Hero, the 1993 movie that sees Schwarzenegger working with all of his best skills as an actor. Every part of this movie is unbeatable, too. John McTiernan (Die Hard) is in the director's seat, working from a script co-written by Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) and overseeing performances from F. Murray Abraham, Robert Prosky, Anthony Quinn, Charles Dance, Art Carney, Tom Noonan, and Schwarzenegger. It blends action with satire, presenting to audiences a delightful send-up of the action genre that feels way ahead of its time and demands far more attention than we've given it since its theatrical release.
In Last Action Hero, Schwarzenegger plays fictional action hero Jack Slater (played by a fictional version of Schwarzenegger in a fun meta twist). Jack is beloved by Danny (Austin O'Brien), a young fan who, with the help of a magic movie ticket, is transported into the newest Jack Slater movie. Danny is able to put his Jack Slater knowledge and love of action movies to good use as he helps Jack find Benedict (Dance), a criminal mastermind responsible for killing Jack's cousin. Along the way, Danny tries to convince Jack he's living in a fictional world and that the things Jack thinks are normal — like every woman in his version of Los Angeles being impossibly perfect, being unable to swear, or never getting mortally wounded despite being in constant peril — are just the stuff of movies.
Schwarzenegger is completely in the zone in Last Action Hero. Able to draw on the wells of experience as an action star and dip his toe into a new kind of comedy, Schwarzenegger's performance as Jack Slater (as well as his meta performance as himself during a movie premiere sequence) showcase how nimble a performer he truly is. In a movie that sends up a genre Schwarzenegger has thrived in for years, he really sinks his teeth into playing the stereotype while also having fun with it, gamely working from a script that is rife with verbal gags as well as sight gags. Even Schwarzenegger's casting feels like a comment on the kind of movie Last Action Hero is poking at and he probably knew it at the time since it feels like he's playing into that meta-casting as he dials it up to 11.