Are you saying that you would expect the following to work as (I) intended?

No, not at all. What I'm saying is that the code I wrote achieves the goal of removing the extra variable (i.e., there's no explicit $action code ref) while not achieving the goal of a "$obj->blah(@args)" style syntax. To be longer and more explicit:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;

my $obj = bless {}, 'Foo';
my @args = ( 'hello' );
{
    @_ = ( $obj, @args );
    print Dumper( \@_ )
}
__END__
$VAR1 = [
          bless( {}, 'Foo' ),
          'hello'
        ];
[download]

The functional difference between this and what you're shooting for is (in addition to the gross syntax difference) that this one is taking copies in @_ instead of aliases.

So, perhaps a better short version of what I'm saying is, "if all you want to do is eliminate a variable, do this..." Sorry for the confusion.