The greatest movies never made: how John Cleese sunk John McTiernan and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ‘Sgt Rock’

Between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, there wasn’t a hotter director in the action genre than John McTiernan. In front of the camera, there was no bigger star than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Behind the keyboard, there was no writer more precocious than Shane Black. And yet, those three heavyweights saw their plans to take on a blockbuster comic book movie torpedoed by John Cleese, of all people.

The trio had already collaborated on Predator, but Black’s involvement was restricted to a quip-happy supporting role as Hawkins, although he did perform some uncredited script polishing. Still, the list of credits the three amassed in that aforementioned golden period is the stuff genre junkie’s dreams are made of.

McTiernan followed his breakout feature with Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October. Black’s first published screenplay was Lethal Weapon, and he quickly became the highest-paid scribe in Hollywood through The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight. Schwarzenegger’s status as the musclebound face of the Reagan-era action flick had made him one of the most famous people on the planet.

For their next port of all, the ‘Holy Trinity’ of late-1980s action was eying a big-budget adaptation of the DC Comics character, Sgt Rock, which appealed to all of their shared interests. Black was a master at scripting one-liners, and Schwarzenegger was fonder than most of deploying them onscreen, with McTiernan established as one of action’s most proficient auteurs.

The plan was for Black to write the script with Schwarzenegger headlining the cast and McTiernan wielding the megaphone, albeit with an unusual twist. Their Sgt Rock was going to be inspired by the 1958 war comedy Imitation General, which would have made it both a comic book adaptation indebted to the titular soldier’s antics on the page and a thinly veiled remake of an established film.

Imitation General revolved around an officer posing as a general during World War II and using his newfound – and unearned – status to lead his troops to victory. Still, McTiernan’s Sgt Rock was aiming to cast John Cleese as a cook who’d fibbed his way to lofty military status. He required the protection of Schwarzenegger’s title character when he realised he was way out of his depth and an epic battle loomed just over the horizon.

The filmmaker set up a meeting with Cleese to discuss the project, but as he explained to Nick de Semlyen, “As far as he was concerned, we were just a couple of thug American action movie makers.” McTiernan’s magnum opus was yet to be released, which he believed may have swayed the Monty Python veteran’s decision.

“If he’d seen Die Hard, I think he probably would have signed up, but he judged us on our reputation,” he mused. “It would have been delightful. John Cleese would have had so much fun making fun of Arnold and vice versa. That was the whole essence of the movie.” Unfortunately, when Cleese refused to commit, McTiernan’s intuition proved to be right on the money, and Sgt Rock evaporated.

When he eventually reunited with Schwarzenegger and Black, it was under the less exciting circumstances of Last Action Hero, an underrated gem that did itself no favours opening in direct competition to Steven Spielberg’s all-conquering Jurassic Park.

Sgt Rock was never going to win any Academy Awards, but that wasn’t its intention. On paper, the prospect of a World War II buddy caper partnering Schwarzenegger and Cleese that had been written by the brains behind Lethal Weapon and directed by the guy responsible for Die Hard could have comfortably taken its place among the key creatives’ pantheon of high points, but 50% of the central double act failing to commit ended up cutting it off at the knees.

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