Arnold Schwarzenegger

The cinema of Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t occupy vast shelf space at Auteur House.  To label the thickly accented Austrian ham a limited actor would be to damn with faint praise.  With the exception of gnarly pieces of deadwood timber like Chuck Norris Big Arnie is the least able thespian ever to achieve star status.  A muscle bound Neanderthal whose calling card to Hollywood comprised sundry body-building titles, he had a successful bricklaying career before that and in his youth was regularly beaten by a Nazi dad.  Outside of this richly fascist heritage his salient characteristics are steroid abuse, groping anything in a skirt and polluting the environment in as many ways as possible (cigars and Humvees being the vices of first choice).

Arnie got a new nick name last week.  ‘The Inseminator’ became the latest in a long list of Schwarzenegger nom de plumes, following on from Mr Universe, The Terminator, Governor of California and the memorable hybrid of the last two, The Governator.  It seems that Arnie has been a generous employer as well as a typical Kennedy family husband, giving the maid a love child and his now estranged wife something of a headache.  Unconfirmed reports suggest that Maria Shriver responded by herself drawing on the vast catalogue of Schwarzenegger one-liners, bringing down the curtain on a quarter century marriage with the to-the-point statement: “fuck you, arsehole”.

The thinking world shudders at the thought of the has-been politician and exposed philanderer attempting to revive a movie career in his seventh decade.  Whilst destroying the West Coast economy Arnie was more or less in cinematic retirement, bothering us only with dreadful cameos (”Around the World in 80 Days”, “The Expendables”) and digital animations of his younger, robotic self (”Terminator Salvation”).  Now he’s got a divorce and child care to pay for.

If he ever had a finest hour before the cameras it was the first “Terminator” film.  I don’t personally mind the second one either.  His vanity is amusing in the body building classic “Pumping Iron” and he got to work with Robert Altman in “The Long Goodbye”.  “Eraser” is probably the only non-”Terminator” vehicle worth watching.  The balance of the Schwarzenegger oeuvre is just the pits with the nadir being his Mr Freeze in “Batman and Robin”, a black hole of a performance that singlehandedly killed the franchise dead.  Please, for once, let him not be back.