Because we love a good action ꧑movie, and because we are feeling nostalgic, here is a complete ranking of all of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movies from worst to best. Of course, nothing is ever as simple as it seems, so before we get started, here is how we arrived at this completely unscientific and quite subjective list.
First of all, we decided to only rank the movies that Mr. Schwarzenegger (who will only be referred to as “Arnold” from now on) made during a certain time frame, namely from his breakthrough role in Conan The Barbarian, to the start of his career as a politician after Around the World in 80 Days. This is what we can more or less refer to as Arnold’s prime, or his golden age if you will. This is the time where he could do no wrong, and even his objectively terrible ๊starring roles were welcomed by the movie-going public who was craving that trademark Austrian char🥃m.
Second, though Arnold is more well-known for his action movies, we still included his comedies and tried to rate them on an equal footing. We thought it would be hard, but Arnold’s physical charisma transcends simp🎉le stunts and fights, and can often carry him through movies that꧟ require him to talk a lot.
Finally, although it is how the general public became aware of Arnold’s awesome presence, we excluded Pumping Iron because it is a documentary, no matter how♕ entertaining the man can be🐼 as himself.
On to the list!
24 Arnold Goes To The Well One Time Too Many🥂
Arnold’s Conan series was extremely successful and put him on the map as an actor. This is not one of those movies, because they are actually entertaining, and will thus appear much later in the list. This is Red Sonja. The movie was made in 1985, after directors figured that he was so good as Conan that they could just put Arnold in any fantasy setting and watch the money flow. Red Sonja proves this theory wrong in many ways.
First of all, Arnold plays Lord Kalidor, who is nothing more than a sidekick to Brigitte Nielsen’s Red Sonja. The movie focuses on a revenge story, kinda like every other Conan lookalike of that day. To make things even more confusing, the story is set in the same land as the Conan movies, but Arnold’s character is a completely different man, even though he dresses similarly and carries pretty much the same sword. The easy way to differentiate the movies, however, is that the characters in this one are only half as interesting, and the story is about twice as slow. It’s also incredibly a꧃rchaic and questionable in its moral values. If you think I am being too hard on the movie, just know that Arnold himself has declared it to be the worst movie he ever made.
23 ꦏ Arnold Has An Accident
The theory that something will work a second time because it was successful once was applied to Red Sonja, but it also affected Arnold’s comedy work. Junior is what happens when director Ivan Reitman thinks that Arnold and Danny Devito can make magic out of anything just because Twins was a decent movie. This time around, the two plays a geneticist and a doctor who decide to get Arnold’s character pregnant because they ca☂nnot find a willing subject to test out a drug which is supposed to prevent miscarriage.
The “comedy” comes from Arnold going through every single stereotypes one might ever have had about pregnant women, such as weird cravings and heightened emotions. He also develops an interest in massages and self-care, and he sometimes ha🍒s a good cry while watching commercials on television.
It’s like a second-rate improv team’s idea of what pregnancy is like.
What really disappoints is that the movie is full of extremely capable and funny actors, such as Emma Thompson and Pamela Reed, but the material they are given is so terrible that they sink with the movie. You would think that watching Arnold go to an expecting mothers’ retreat in drag would be funny, at least for the overacting and the faces he makes, but Junior can’t even make that work.
22 Arnold Stops Armageddon 🌟
In End of Days, Arnold stars as Jericho Cane, a New York ಞpolice officer, and his partner is Bobby Chicago, and together, they are the most ridiculously named cop duo in the history of a🌞ction movies. This is the least of the movie’s worries, however, as it is terribly acted, directed, and written. Strangely, the project could have been very different, with names such as Guillermo Del Toro, Tom Cruise, Kate Winslet and Liv Tyler being attached to it at various points during production, but instead, we ended up with this.
The movie takes place right at the turn of the 21st century, and Arnold must stop Satan himself from getting a woman pregnant before the new millennium starts, for it would bring forth the end of the world or something like that. End of Days tries to convince you of how bad this would be with gratuitous bloodletting, but even Gabriel Byrne at his sleaziest cannot manage to make Satan interesting. As for Arnold, he obviously wasn’t feeling it in this one. His character is supposed to be chronically depressed after having lost his family to a hitman, but all he can manage is puppy dog eyes and the occasional frown. The only way you can tell his character is ⛄sad is because he doesn’t shave. By the midpoint of this film, you’ll be begging for the apocalypse to end your suffering.
21 Arnold Catches A Coಌld
Despite the movie’s well-earned reputation, Batman & Robin is surprisingly not the worst movie of Arnold’s career! Still, it is without a doubt the worst Batman movie ever made. George Clooney is miscast as the Dark Knight, and the story finishes what Batman Forever started by completely abandoni🎀ng, then taking to the woodshed and burying in the ground, the moody world and atmosphere built by Tim Burton in the first movie of the series. This article is about Arnold however, so how did he fare?
Obviously, he did not know that the film would turn out the way it did. Arnold nearly brings up the movie to his enthusiasm level, with sheer campiness and a strong helping of cold-based pun. As an 80s action movies veteran, Arnold has a lot of experience with stupid puns, and the script here is giving him all he can handle. There’s his Mister Freeze utters being played one after the other, and it makes you think that this might be a wonderfully silly little film. Unfortunately, Batman & Robin is longer than 4 minutes, and the rest of the cast isn’t trying half as hard as Arnold. If everyone had embrace♈d the ridiculousness as much as he did, it might have been watchable despite the senseless script.
20 🤪 Arnold Will Only Be Here For A Short While
Around the World in 80 Days is the last movie Arnold made in his prime before he took his political hiatus. Unfortunately, it’s little more than a glorified cameo, even though the publicity for the movie tried to make you believe that he had a much bigger role. As a retelling of Jules Verne’s classic book, it takes many liberties with ♔the story, to the point where the only thing it has in common with the source material is the name of the characters and the general premise. Everything that h♒appens in between is designed to give Jackie Chan’s character, who in the original story is merely a sidekick, a lot more to chew on.
As for Arnold, he plays the rol🍒e of Prince Hapi, a monarch who a🧸ppears on screen for a few minutes as a minor villain when the main characters make a short stop in Turkey.
He hams it up for the camera, but there’s only so much he can do in ten minutes.
It also feels slightly weird for a man with a strong Austrian a🐼ccent to be playing a Turkish Prince, because you can’t suspend your disbelief. While I am usually willing to accept whatever Arnold’s role is supposed to be, here, he just looks like regular Arnold in a community theater costume.
19 Arnold Takes Down An Entire Country (Then Saves Another One) 🅰
Seeing Collateral Damage for the first time, I thought we were going to see a different side of Arnold. He is almost touching at the start of the movie, as he does real acting and shows real emotions. His character is a simple fireman (not an ex-spy, or a commando, or a one-man wrecking crew) who has lost his family in a terrorist attack. Unlike in End of the Days, he actually emotes in a way that is proper for someone who has suffered at leng♚th. We might really be on to something heꦛre!
And then, the fireman decides to take matters into his own hands. At that point, the movie degenerates into the worst stereotypes of the rest of Arnold’s filmography. He travels to a tropical setting, and takes down the bad guy’s base single-handedly, and also saves a couple of innocents along the way. It’s all extremely predictable. And then, because the movie tries to prove me wrong, there’s a twist near the ending where we learn that the real villain was the very same innocent he saved! The way it is presented makes it obvious that the 🐓movie thought it was really clever, but it’s not enough to make the previous hour and a half any more interesting.
18 ℱ Arnold Avenges A Good Friend
After watching Raw Deal, you will feel like you have seꦕen Arnold do that movie many times before, but you would be wrong. The movie is not as well-known or as popular as the rest of his filmography, but it was one of the first to employ the formula. Released in 1986, it has some really good action and some brutal fights, and I can offici𝓡ally say that it is the first movie in this list which I would deem “tolerable”. However, it doesn’t mean that it is without flaws.
Raw Deal is a classic revenge story, although by proxy. Arnold must avenge an elderly ex-FBI agent who has lost his son to a mob hit. It’s convoluted, but whatever sends Arnold in any direction to start kicking butts works for me. What doesn’t work as well is the weird secondary characters and unnecessary additions. These drag the story down. For example, did we really need the backstory with Arnold being demoted to being a small town sheriff and his alcoholic wife who doesn’t cope well with the new life? Coul♍dn’t he just avenge his friend wꦕhile being a regular, loyal friend who didn’t have problems of his own? It’s like they tacked on half of a Hallmark Channel movie’s script on top of their usual “Arnold beats up people who wronged him” story.
17 🙈 Arnold Is Ru𝄹ssian Now
Red Heat is definitely a product of its time, but it still works despite the dated jokes and obvious changes to🌱 tౠhe political landscape. Arnold is pretty funny as the straight-faced Moscow cop stuck in the US back when the USSR was still a thing, and the movie has all the makings of a classic buddy cop comedy. Unfortunately, his partner in this is James Belushi.
This is “prime” James Belushi, if there ever was such a thing, so his “anger management issues” act had not gotten old yet.
However, if you are watching this years later, after too many episodes of According to Jim, you might want to avoid this.
Red Heat really plays to Arnold’s strengths by putting him in a role which is a role tailor-made for the early part of his career. The strong accent actually adds to the character! When it is not busy overindulging Belushi’s loudmouth police officer, the movie focuses on good action and solid car chases. The final chase, where the good guys and the villain each have their own Greyhound bus, is worth the price of admission by itself. It’s not a highlight of American cinema by any means, but there’s more than enough here to keep you entertained all the way thr๊ough.
16 Arnold Learns A Valuable Lesson About The ♉Spirit Of Christmas
Objectively, Jingle All The Way is a pretty terrible movie. However, I do have a soft spot for it because I catch it every other year on television around Christmas time and it has become an expected and comfo🅷rting presence.
If we focus on the bad parts, we have to start with Sinbad, who is particularly insufferable. He plays 🌼a mailman who losᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚes his grip on reality because his son wants an action figure of Turbo Man. Arnold kinda does the same if we’re being honest, he’s just a lot more likable. Actually, the more I think about it, the more it seems like everyone has lost their mind in this movie. These people are willing to make fake bomb threats, kidnap kids, break into their neighbour’s home and beat each other up over an action figure. So why is this movie not ranked any lower?
Other than the previously mentioned Arnold charm, the real star of this movie is Phil Hartman. He is hilarious as the annoying neighbour, the perfect storm of smarminess and class, with just a touch of sleaziness on top of it all. It’s ꦛone of the few movies on this list where Arnold gets the spotlight stolen from him, and Hartman's performance saves the movie.
15 Arnold Stars As Arnold Schwarzeꦏnegger
Last Action Hero is a hard movie to pin down. It was marketed towards kids at the time of iღts release, but it also has a surprising amount of violence for something supposed to be family-friendly. It also has a very interesting premise: a child can move back and forth betweenܫ the real world and the movie world with the help of a golden ticket stub, and he uses it to help his favourite movie character apprehend bad guys. That hero is Jack Slater, a cop obviously played by Arnold.
The movie honestly starts out great, and it’s a lot of fun to watch the kid help Arnold figure out how his own movie work. However, it jumps the shark around the time where the movie-within-a-movie’s henchman steals the ticket and tries to assemble a team of fictional supervillains to take over the real world. At this point, Arnold plays both himself and Jack Slater, and the lines start to blur. If Last Action Hero had stayed about the kid helping Arnold to figure out the ins and outs of his universe, it could have been a fun satire. Instead, I was honestly confused by the end, and judging by everyone’s performance, I wasn’t the only one💟.