Okay, Cobra. People either say this film rules for all its action or sucks for it's utter farcity and lack of acting or plot. Fair enough on both counts.
Actually, it helps to say that this isn't really a movie. This is what people had to do for their fill of mindless action before computer and video games like Doom, Duke Nukem and Quake came out. Full of overblown violence, thrilling action scenes and unrealistic, over-the-top characters.
As far as the regular film rudiments like story, plot or acting or niggling little things like believability, forget it. The story is nothing more than an unoriginal joke. They basically made Dirty Harry Plus here. Picture Harry Calahan younger, with sort of a '50s styling, with more and bigger guns and a cooler car vs. a whole army of axe-wielding fascist psychos who seem to want to kill people for... no reason at all. Throw in Brigitte Neilson as the blonde model Cobra (Stallone) has to protect from the psychos, the obligatory police department brass who don't believe him or in his violent loner ways, etc., etc., etc. and you basically have every cheesy cops and robbers movie since the 70's, times 10. They even have the obligatory Latino sidekick (who gets injured and taken out of the big, final fight early), the bad cop who turns out to be in cahoots with the bad guys, the big, bad knife-wielding leader of the psychos who expects to plead insanity and get off and calls Cobra a pig repeatedly, they even went so far to throw in Andy Robinson, who played the Scorpio killer in the first Dirty Harry movie, just to let us know what they were going for. The crazy loner cop who kills everybody, the brass who don't back him up, the weasely "by the book" competitor detective, the blonde bombshell, the car chases, gun-fights, cheesy one-liners, the trip to take a witness away into seclusion that turns into a trap and big battle, it's all here. Get philosophical about it: Cobra isn't just a cheesy cop action vehicle from the 80's, it's EVERY cheesy cop vehicle ever. Every one of them was just leading up to this movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Last Action Hero" was making fun of this kind of movie. This is "McBain" from "The Simpsons".
Okay, Cobretti (Cobra) is a loner cop who doesn't like to play by the rules who is the top cop in the "Zombie" squad in the LAPD, the squad that takes down the psychos nobody else wants to mess with. Arrayed against him is some bizarre cult of nuts who like to clash two axes together over their heads in a warehouse and want to establish some sort of "new order", which they hope to achieve by senselessly knifing or axing people. They target a fashion model, played by Neilson, and relentlessly pursue her through her building, hospitals, streets, foundries, etc. Cobra gets involved to protect her, stumbles on to the "whole army" after her that the brass won't believe, even after multiple suspects are stopped coming for her. This goes through fights with fists, guns, explosions, a car chase with Cobra in his stylin' nitro-boosted roadster, and the denouement in the backwoods somewhere where they are hiding out to protect her and get mobbed by the whole lot of Jason Voorhees disciples.
This is a pretty fascist movie, in the Dirty Harry way. Cobra isn't like Harry, just bending or breaking the rules when he has to, he does it as his regular job. The brass seems to look the other way when he gets results, at least by the end. The criminals have no background or motivation, they are just miscreants who like to kill because, well, just because the movie needs bad guys who aren't nice people like you and me, and bad cops who aren't like you and me either to protect us.
I have a lot of cops, and other people in some part of the legal or law enforcement profession, in my family so I know the straight dope up front. Frankly put, everyone is on to the fact that all the cop stuff on TV and movies over the past 30 years is mindless garbage. Cops work as part of a system and are expected to follow the rules. While they do break the rules, they can get in serious trouble if they get caught doing it flagrantly all the time and no department is going to get caught sanctioning that in the face of public and legal pressure for long. Police also work in teams, as part of a big system, and the idea of a "cop who works alone" is a contradiction in terms. Cops win against the bad guys by using teamwork as their primary weapon. Bad guys also usually have at least some intelligence and limited self-preservation instincts. While some do really stupid things like act out in public, kill people for little or no reason, or try to kill cops, most don't simply because those that do don't live very long.
The other realism stuff: any cop who tools around in a private car like that has gotta be on the take; that wierd not-quite submachinegun thing Cobra uses in the end is too complicated, with all sorts of shiny, neat looking but useless things, like a laser-sight, and I wouldn't take it to a fistfight; all the fighting scenes, people are usually dead or seriously injured within seconds in any serious fight, etc., etc., etc. ad nauseum.
I'm sure everyone knows this, and will say "It's just a movie", and they're right. I just had to say all of this.
Stallone doesn't so much act his way through this as muddle. Total deadpan, cheesy lines, etc. He's just on autopilot. Neilson actually does better, and that's not saying much. The big bad guy knife killer is a bit better, in his totally out-there role, he plays big evil psycho guy up decently enough.
Okay, for all the "bad" about the movie, it has its merit. We watch cheesy cop movies for a reason, they're fun. This movie is nothing more than mind candy, but it is tasty. I said that this was pretty much a video game. That's the way to think about it, think of it as watching someone else play Quake. They run around solo shooting people and blowing things up with all sorts of big guns for no real reason. We like the long fights, chases, the big explosions, the big guns, the hammy dialogue. This film isn't on the level with anything by John Woo, supreme master of the action ballet. Woo always uses action as a secondary vehicle to tell a compelling story, which is why he is great. But his actions scenes are masterful in and of themselves and leave us breathless and Cobra doesn't lack much for the breathless factor. We want to watch movies that take us some place bigger, faster, louder, more exciting, more over the top than real life ever could be. We also, even if we like originality, can and do find some comfort in familiar formulas, if they hit the right, time-tested notes.
I truly believe, on this score, the producers fully knew what they were doing. This flick is just way too far into copying the Dirty Harry formula, especially with all it's little extra touches, to have been accidental. One can call it soulless or spineless or lazy to just bite off what others have done and know how it will work, but if it does work all the same, we can't really fault them for it.
There was talk that Cobra was meant to be the first in a series, another character with a name with five letters and two syllables for Stallone to turn into a franchise. (i.e.: "Rocky", "Rambo") It wasn't successful enough for a talked about sequel around 1990. Actually I'm almost glad it didn't get spun off, and not because it was a bad film or a failed effort (though one could say it was). This film best stands alone, by itself in film history, on a number of fronts. As an ultimate expression of style over substance, or scene over script, or action over acting. Or as the final, logical, distilled product of so many cop-action films before it: the absolute zenith, or the absolute nadir, of everything that came even before Dirty Harry.
Actually, it helps to say that this isn't really a movie. This is what people had to do for their fill of mindless action before computer and video games like Doom, Duke Nukem and Quake came out. Full of overblown violence, thrilling action scenes and unrealistic, over-the-top characters.
As far as the regular film rudiments like story, plot or acting or niggling little things like believability, forget it. The story is nothing more than an unoriginal joke. They basically made Dirty Harry Plus here. Picture Harry Calahan younger, with sort of a '50s styling, with more and bigger guns and a cooler car vs. a whole army of axe-wielding fascist psychos who seem to want to kill people for... no reason at all. Throw in Brigitte Neilson as the blonde model Cobra (Stallone) has to protect from the psychos, the obligatory police department brass who don't believe him or in his violent loner ways, etc., etc., etc. and you basically have every cheesy cops and robbers movie since the 70's, times 10. They even have the obligatory Latino sidekick (who gets injured and taken out of the big, final fight early), the bad cop who turns out to be in cahoots with the bad guys, the big, bad knife-wielding leader of the psychos who expects to plead insanity and get off and calls Cobra a pig repeatedly, they even went so far to throw in Andy Robinson, who played the Scorpio killer in the first Dirty Harry movie, just to let us know what they were going for. The crazy loner cop who kills everybody, the brass who don't back him up, the weasely "by the book" competitor detective, the blonde bombshell, the car chases, gun-fights, cheesy one-liners, the trip to take a witness away into seclusion that turns into a trap and big battle, it's all here. Get philosophical about it: Cobra isn't just a cheesy cop action vehicle from the 80's, it's EVERY cheesy cop vehicle ever. Every one of them was just leading up to this movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Last Action Hero" was making fun of this kind of movie. This is "McBain" from "The Simpsons".
Okay, Cobretti (Cobra) is a loner cop who doesn't like to play by the rules who is the top cop in the "Zombie" squad in the LAPD, the squad that takes down the psychos nobody else wants to mess with. Arrayed against him is some bizarre cult of nuts who like to clash two axes together over their heads in a warehouse and want to establish some sort of "new order", which they hope to achieve by senselessly knifing or axing people. They target a fashion model, played by Neilson, and relentlessly pursue her through her building, hospitals, streets, foundries, etc. Cobra gets involved to protect her, stumbles on to the "whole army" after her that the brass won't believe, even after multiple suspects are stopped coming for her. This goes through fights with fists, guns, explosions, a car chase with Cobra in his stylin' nitro-boosted roadster, and the denouement in the backwoods somewhere where they are hiding out to protect her and get mobbed by the whole lot of Jason Voorhees disciples.
This is a pretty fascist movie, in the Dirty Harry way. Cobra isn't like Harry, just bending or breaking the rules when he has to, he does it as his regular job. The brass seems to look the other way when he gets results, at least by the end. The criminals have no background or motivation, they are just miscreants who like to kill because, well, just because the movie needs bad guys who aren't nice people like you and me, and bad cops who aren't like you and me either to protect us.
I have a lot of cops, and other people in some part of the legal or law enforcement profession, in my family so I know the straight dope up front. Frankly put, everyone is on to the fact that all the cop stuff on TV and movies over the past 30 years is mindless garbage. Cops work as part of a system and are expected to follow the rules. While they do break the rules, they can get in serious trouble if they get caught doing it flagrantly all the time and no department is going to get caught sanctioning that in the face of public and legal pressure for long. Police also work in teams, as part of a big system, and the idea of a "cop who works alone" is a contradiction in terms. Cops win against the bad guys by using teamwork as their primary weapon. Bad guys also usually have at least some intelligence and limited self-preservation instincts. While some do really stupid things like act out in public, kill people for little or no reason, or try to kill cops, most don't simply because those that do don't live very long.
The other realism stuff: any cop who tools around in a private car like that has gotta be on the take; that wierd not-quite submachinegun thing Cobra uses in the end is too complicated, with all sorts of shiny, neat looking but useless things, like a laser-sight, and I wouldn't take it to a fistfight; all the fighting scenes, people are usually dead or seriously injured within seconds in any serious fight, etc., etc., etc. ad nauseum.
I'm sure everyone knows this, and will say "It's just a movie", and they're right. I just had to say all of this.
Stallone doesn't so much act his way through this as muddle. Total deadpan, cheesy lines, etc. He's just on autopilot. Neilson actually does better, and that's not saying much. The big bad guy knife killer is a bit better, in his totally out-there role, he plays big evil psycho guy up decently enough.
Okay, for all the "bad" about the movie, it has its merit. We watch cheesy cop movies for a reason, they're fun. This movie is nothing more than mind candy, but it is tasty. I said that this was pretty much a video game. That's the way to think about it, think of it as watching someone else play Quake. They run around solo shooting people and blowing things up with all sorts of big guns for no real reason. We like the long fights, chases, the big explosions, the big guns, the hammy dialogue. This film isn't on the level with anything by John Woo, supreme master of the action ballet. Woo always uses action as a secondary vehicle to tell a compelling story, which is why he is great. But his actions scenes are masterful in and of themselves and leave us breathless and Cobra doesn't lack much for the breathless factor. We want to watch movies that take us some place bigger, faster, louder, more exciting, more over the top than real life ever could be. We also, even if we like originality, can and do find some comfort in familiar formulas, if they hit the right, time-tested notes.
I truly believe, on this score, the producers fully knew what they were doing. This flick is just way too far into copying the Dirty Harry formula, especially with all it's little extra touches, to have been accidental. One can call it soulless or spineless or lazy to just bite off what others have done and know how it will work, but if it does work all the same, we can't really fault them for it.
There was talk that Cobra was meant to be the first in a series, another character with a name with five letters and two syllables for Stallone to turn into a franchise. (i.e.: "Rocky", "Rambo") It wasn't successful enough for a talked about sequel around 1990. Actually I'm almost glad it didn't get spun off, and not because it was a bad film or a failed effort (though one could say it was). This film best stands alone, by itself in film history, on a number of fronts. As an ultimate expression of style over substance, or scene over script, or action over acting. Or as the final, logical, distilled product of so many cop-action films before it: the absolute zenith, or the absolute nadir, of everything that came even before Dirty Harry.