Arnold movie review & film summary (2023) – Roger Ebert

The fawning docuseries “Arnold” repackages Arnold Schwarzenegger’s already well-spun and streamlined biography. In three hour-long episodes dedicated to his three main careers (bodybuilder, film actor, and politician), Schwarzenegger offers negligible on-camera and voiceover-narrated commentary for film clips, outdated and new speaking head interviews, and self-congratulatory pep-talk commentary about his life, whose selectively remembered setbacks all arrange him for some future, uncritically vaunted success.

The best pleasures on this overproduced miniseries will solely please pre-existing followers, who’ve both already purchased what Schwarzenegger’s now reselling—the unstoppable foreigner and other people’s hero who overcame nice adversity and achieved his wildest goals—or simply need to see the ex-Governator skittishly namedrop profession lowlights like “The Villain” and “Batman and Robin” earlier than and after new soundbites from Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron that make Schwarzenegger look higher.

Schwarzenegger cocks a schticky eyebrow and puffs on evenly-lit cigars whereas admiring espresso table-sized books full of high-resolution pictures of himself from over time. He has a PR-friendly anecdote or take for nearly each second in his public life, from the primary time he met his ex-wife Maria Shriver (and complimented her ass to her mother Eunice) to his extramarital affair with Mildred Patricia Baena, and their son Joseph, each of whom he acknowledges in “Arnold.”

That stuff’s outdated information, or sufficiently old that it may be used to decorate the Austrian Oak’s progress narrative, which solely makes temporary stops at main life occasions, just like the dying of his brother Meinhard or the field workplace failure of “Final Motion Hero,” to shrug them off with platitudinous grace.

Arnold waves away the boisterous, bullying media persona that he and his individuals have pumped up for many years now, calling it a lot “smäh,” a German phrase that he interprets as “bullshit” (extra like a jokey con job). It’s type of amusing to see Schwarzenegger soften historical past to his whims, going as far as to sparingly acknowledge the L.A. Instances and their essential investigative reporting, together with some gentle speaking head interviews with reporters Mark Z. Barabak and Carla Corridor. He apologizes, once more, for having “behaved badly.”

Schwarzenegger additionally dismisses antisemitism as “a horrible, loser ideology” in a clip from one among his current social-media hearth chats. That line enhances his current claims about having solely admired Hitler’s method with phrases, not his Nazi politics, which in all probability performs higher in the event you both don’t bear in mind or care concerning the a part of that 1992 Spy Journal article on Schwarzenegger the place author Charles Fleming confirms the rumor that Schwarzenegger used to present individuals with information of Hitler’s speeches.