Photo: Vulture and Shutterstock Never underestimate Arnold Strong. When bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger plotted his move to Hollywood to become an actor, he was pressured into changing his last name for his first film, 1970’s Hercules in New York. “[N]obody could pronounce Schwarzenegger … it was a ludicrous name,” he observed in his memoir Total Recall.
So let’s rank his best performances. A couple of ground rules first, though. We decided not to include the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, and we’re bypassing The Long Goodbye, The Villain, and Scavenger Hunt because they’re just so minor. As an actor, Schwarzenegger is far from nuanced, but the towering, monolithic bluntness of his best performances has its own kind of power. Lots of people want to be movie stars, but he figured out a way to make it happen.
26. Collateral Damage The last of his headlining non-franchise movies before heading to Sacramento, Collateral Damage is a by-the-numbers revenge thriller that gained entirely unearned accidental resonance after 9/11, when its guy-loses-family-to-terrorists-so-goes-on-a-rampage plot rang a little too hollow.
22. Around the World in 80 Days The official last movie role Arnold had before taking the governorship is an extended comic cameo in this remake, which features the truly bizarre buddy pairing of Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan. Schwarzenegger plays Prince Hapi, a creepy, handsy, spoiled prince whom our heroes come across and quickly scamper away from. Arnold is clearly having a fun time playing this guy, but that doesn’t mean you will watching him.
18. Aftermath As he grows older, Schwarzenegger has tried to transition into Eastwoodesque Tortured Old Warrior mode, with mixed results. Here, he plays Roman, a man whose wife and daughter are killed in a plane crash that he blames on an air-traffic controller . Arnold spends most of the movie brooding and trying to get his revenge on the poor guy, whose life has been ruined by the guilt. If this sounds awfully moody and sad for an Arnold movie, you’re right.
14. Red Heat A buddy-cop movie straight out of the prime era for buddy-cop movies, Red Heat finds Arnold playing a Russian policeman who comes to Chicago to investigate a murder with, get this, a totally mismatched partner . Lots of different metatextual subplots going on here, from Arnold trying to “stretch” — though his accent is still not even slightly Russian — to Belushi trying to take his brother’s mantle to Walter Hill trying to scrub his ’70s grime into ’80s gold.
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