Opinion The Terminator is back
After an eight-year hiatus,Arnold Schwarzenegger is returning to the film career he left behind for political office
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After an eight-year hiatus,Arnold Schwarzenegger is returning to the film career he left behind for political office
MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES
Arnold Schwarzenegger was blunt in his description of his new movie role: Take a knife,cut a head off,kill a guy. And he was playful in his follow-up. You wish you could do some of those things when youre in politics,but you cant, he said as he returned to the mayhem business movie-style at the first day of the Comic-Con International convention in San Diego last Thursday. Tanned and glowing in an open-collared white shirt and sport coat,Schwarzenegger introduced 6,000 roaring fans to his new action film,The Expendables 2 and talked death counts with the movies co-writer and star,Sylvester Stallone. Schwarzenegger acknowledged being competitive about these things. If Stallone killed 288 people in an action-career clip reel assembled for the convention,Schwarzenegger said his reel racked up 289. And,of course,he growled: Im back. He returns in a cloud of carbon emissions,never mind the signature global warming legislation he enacted when he was Californias governor. In the movies trailer,his character tears the door off a Smart Car,smokes bad guys with his machine gun and wags a fat cigar. His role in the movie is more than a cameo,though not quite a lead. Schwarzenegger was flanked on the stage at the San Diego Convention Centre by several co-stars. The crowd was clapping,stomping and champing at the bit by the time Stallone,first among his crew,took the stage. But the fans ate it up,down to his growly Yo!
But it was lost on no one that Schwarzeneggers appearance marks his return to a film career that will find him taking more substantial action roles,even though he will qualify for Medicare upon turning 65 this month. He will appear in The Last Stand,a story about border violence set for release in January,and The Tomb,expected to be released in the fall of 2013 by Lionsgate.
The Expendables 2 is also being distributed by Lionsgate,the mini-major studio that scored a huge,youth-oriented hit with The Hunger Games this year. Clearly,Lionsgate is feeling confident that Schwarzenegger still has some of the drawing power he had before he left the film business to run for governor in 2003. He served in that role for eight years,leaving in 2011 during the bruising breakup of his marriage to Maria Shriver,after he acknowledged that he had fathered a child by their housekeeper.
But before becoming governor,Schwarzenegger left Hollywood as a winner; Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,released in July 2003,became Schwarzeneggers second-biggest career hit,behind Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The film was buoyed by a large international audience,which Schwarzeneggers backers are again banking on heavily: His current projects are all built with an eye toward foreign action fans,who presumably will help pay the bills even if his American viewers dont return. Asked through a spokesman about career plans last week,Schwarzenegger did not respond.
But Schwarzeneggers idea,according to people who were briefed on his thinking and who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect relations with the actor is to reboot himself as a kind of younger,rowdier version of Clint Eastwood,who had a hit in 2009 with Gran Torino. That is,he means to find age-appropriate roles while joining what he sees as a revival of the action genre,led by The Expendables 2. Politicians being a rarity here,Schwarzeneggers appearance lent genuine novelty to a fantasy convention where the outlandish is routine.
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