Top Ten Schwarzenegger Post Murder One-Liners

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It’s never been enough for Arnold Schwarzenegger to take your life: he has to take your dignity as well. Acknowledging a good fight or saluting a fallen foe is not his style. What IS his style is murdering you then making a joke about you so everyone still alive knows you were rubbish. Presumably it’s only the fact there are more – oh so very many more – people out there that he needs to kill that prevents his movies from showing scenes where he turns up at his victims funerals to deliver an eulogy that’s basically “mess with the best, die like the rest” before pissing on the coffin. Fortunately, in the limited time he has between actual killing, he’s managed to fit in the following classic murder insults.

10. Predator: “Stick around”.

Predator is actually a really good and relatively serious Schwarzenegger film that keeps to cornball antics to a minimum, but when Arnold and his squad (“we’re a rescue team, not assassins,” as he describes them minutes before they gun down an entire Central American army base) are on the job, you can’t seriously expect the great man not to crack a joke after impaling some guy to a tree with a well-flung machete.

9. Eraser: “You’re luggage”.

Okay, not a great line (and definitely not a great film), but keep this in mind: Arnold says it to an alligator. It’s like he has some kind of psychological disorder really. There’s still time for him to make a film featuring a scene where he puts a slice of bread under a griller and says “you’re toast”.

8. The Running Man: “He had to split”.

Now this is more like it. The Running Man is little more than a collection of murders held together by bad jokes, so it’s only until you think about it afterwards that the true horror hits you: you’ve been cheering on a “hero” who can slice a man named Buzzsaw in half with his own chainsaw then calmly tell his gal sidekick “he had to split”. 

7. Commando: “Don’t disturb my friend, he’s dead tired”.

Commando is basically Patient Zero when it comes to Arnold’s one-liners. Prior to this film he’d often said badass lines – including the career-making pre-murder line “I’ll be back” from the first Terminator – but reportedly upon receiving the script for Commando Arnold requested there be more jokes put in “like James Bond”. Cue a film where pretty much every single individual killing involves a hilarious joke of some kind. Yes, this particular line – delivered after he breaks the neck of the goon assigned to make sure he takes the eleven hour commercial flight to South America, where he’s supposed to kill some tinpot dictator or Arnold’s daughter dies – sounds pretty cold-blooded. But c’mon: he’s got to make sure the airline staff don’t disturb the corpse and raise the alarm! This is the rare occasion where Arnold’s gag-making skills are tactically useful as well as amusing.

6. Total Recall: “Consider that a divorce”.

Like almost all of Paul Verhoven’s Hollywood films, Total Recall is as much a parody of over-the-top action as it is an over-the-top action film. So yeah, why not make a joke after gunning down the woman that, until a few days ago, you thought was the love of your life? For all the psychological talk in this film about Arnold suffering from paranoid delusions and being trapped in his own fantasies, it’s a little surprising no-one mentions the mental problems associated with making jokes while you’re killing dozens of people.

5. Raw Deal: The sound of silence.

In a rare moment of restraint, Arnold doesn’t say anything after killing the head of Chicago’s mafia in this fairly cornball crime drama. Restraint? Who am I trying to kid here? Arnold’s one-liners are all about showing his utter contempt for the people he’s just killed, and here it’s obvious that he thinks so little of the mobster he’s blown away that he can’t even be bothered coming up with a joke. Instead, he dumps a bowl of candy on him. If they made this movie in 2013, he would have farted on the corpse.

4. Commando: “I let him go”.

Yes, everyone remembers the bit with weaselly scumbag Sully where Arnold – after running him off the road – dangles him off a cliff, makes a joke about “this is my weak arm, Sully” then delivers what is pretty much the ultimate pre-killing insult: “Remember how I promised I’d kill you last? [Sully desperately says “yeah, yeah” like it’s going to save him] … I lied.” And down the cliff Sully goes. Unfortunately this clip – and most people’s memories – cut out before the real payoff: Arnold walks back to his girl sidekick who asks “what happened to Sully?” Arnold calmly says… well, you can probably guess.

3. The Running Man: “Here is Sub Zero… now, plain zero”. 

This time it’s not enough simply to make a snarky comment over the corpse of his latest victim: Arnold goes on live television to diss and dismiss his latest foe. Sure, the guy did try to kill him, but he was dressed as a hockey player and his weapon was a hockey stick: how much of a threat would he have been if Arnold just got off the ice?

2. Total Recall: “See you at the party, Richter”.

This might not sound like the snappiest one-liner ever, but consider this: HE JUST TORE THE GUY’S ARMS OFF. Speaking personally, if I’d just been in a fight that ended with me holding the severed arms of some guy whose mangled corpse had just tumbled down a lift-shaft, I’d be too busy throwing up to even remember my own name, let alone that I was invited to a party later that night.

1. Commando: “Let off some steam, Bennett”.

The entire final fight in Commando is amazingly awesome, as Arnold basically uses his insult skills to get chain-mail singlet-wearing nutjob Bennett to throw away every single tactical advantage he has for the opportunity to shoot Arnold “between the balls”. It’s also the point where the action genre’s homosexual subtext becomes text, then TEXT, then takes out a rainbow-striped front page ad in The Gay Times supporting gay marriage. So it comes as no surprise whatsoever that the fight ends with Arnold ramming a large pole into his opponent then looking on admiringly as white stuff spurts out the end of it.

(Lead Image via filmaholicreviews.com)