I’ve always thought it was unfairly maligned because it was marketed poorly. Perhaps this has been said already, but it wasn’t really an action picture. It was seven genres taped together–I forget what they all are, but it starts as a Spielberg-style kid’s fantasy flick, morphs into an action picture and a spoof of action pictures, briefly flirts with romance (between AS and the kid’s mom) and ends up as a Seventh Seal-style art film. There’s also the fact that the AS character must come to grips with the fact that he is a fictional character, giving the film a sort of “meta” angle.
There’s no way an audience would connect with this when they thought they were getting an action-spoof, which is what I thought when I saw it in the theater.
He guessed that you were young based on what you said about movies from the '80s. He did not say you were too young or stupid to understand real movies. So please let this go. It is not worth wasting any more time.