The Best Schwarzenegger Movie Isn't 'Terminator' or 'Predator' (2024)

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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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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He’ll probably want to forget about Around the World in 80 Days, too. In fact, he sorta tried to; Schwarzenegger quietly declined to do publicity for Frank Coraci’s abominable interpretation of Jules Verne’s classic novel, realizing almost too late that his role as Turkish Prince Hapi threw an obstacle in the way of his political aspirations. Around the World in 80 Days is so bad it’s nearly impressive, a waste of good source material, Jackie Chan, and Steve Coogan. The real problem for Arnold, however, was that Hapi was written as a raging pervy stereotype and that the role required Schwarzenegger to wear brownface. Bad movies are nothing new. They open in theaters every week. But Around the World in 80 Days today looks downright shameful.

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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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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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“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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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What’s better than one Arnold? Two Arnolds! One Arnold is trouble for bad guys. Two Arnolds, well, there’s just no escaping your comeuppance. As is the case with any movie that tries to sell Arnold as a regular guy to its audience, The 6th Day suffers from Arnold’s not-at-all-regular stature as a movie star and especially as a model of peak male physicality. He plays a helicopter pilot. Let’s reiterate: In a sci-fi movie set in the near-future where cloning is a thing—an ethically fraught thing, but a thing nonetheless—the only career screenwriters Cormac and Marianne Wibberley could think to give Arnold’s character is “helicopter pilot.” C’mon. But Arnold pulls off the normalcy well enough, handily selling Adam Gibson’s shock at coming home to find he’s been replaced by his doppelganger and thus entangled in the battle over cloning’s morality. The 6th Day mostly gets there; it’s diverting enough, and fascinating enough, and with just enough Arnold to make the experience memorable in his filmography.

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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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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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