Tag: Sylvester Stallone

Demolition Man (1993, Marco Brambilla)

Umm. Yeah. Where to start with Demolition Man. Stallone’s really personable in it. It might be his most personable, because the viewer automatically identifies with him as the modern (mostly modern) guy in the strange future.

The real star is Sandra Bullock, whose performance is far from perfect and her character is poorly written, but she’s fun and cute, which is what Sandra Bullock is supposed to be. She’s likable and genial.

Wesley Snipes is bad. He looks good with the blond hair and the contacts, but he doesn’t have enough personality (frighteningly, he’s too much of an actor) to go wild as needed. Also, the script seems to be scared to mention he’s black, which is interesting.

The direction is okay. The real problem is the editing. I’ve never seen such bad editing from Stuart Baird before. Maybe the direction isn’t okay, the composition is okay and the coverage is awful.

Oh, it did shoot in Los Angeles? I figured it was a runaway production, which would explain the lousy production values. The sets are confined and pseudo-grand, like Batman and Robin, which is fine, since Elliot Goldenthal’s score is the same as his Batman scores.

Some of the film feels very solid. Well, maybe only in hindsight. It’s the kind of movie you watch in the middle of the night and fall asleep during and only are awake for the good parts so you think it’s better than it turns out to be on a complete viewing.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Marco Brambilla; screenplay by Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau and Peter M. Lenkov, based on a story by Lenkov and Reneau; director of photography, Alex Thomson; edited by Stuart Baird; music by Elliot Goldenthal; production designer, David L. Snyder; produced by Joel Silver, Michael Levy and Howard Kazanjian; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Sylvester Stallone (John Spartan), Wesley Snipes (Simon Phoenix), Sandra Bullock (Lt. Lenina Huxley), Nigel Hawthorne (Dr. Raymond Cocteau), Benjamin Bratt (Alfredo Garcia), Bob Gunton (Chief George Earle), Glenn Shadix (Associate Bob), Denis Leary (Edgar Friendly) and Steve Kahan (Captain Healy).

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Judge Dredd (1995, Danny Cannon)

I saw Judge Dredd at a sneak preview. It was the first time I ever saw anyone walk on a movie.

It fits into a rather interesting category of disastrous would-be blockbusters–joining Flash Gordon, The Black Hole and Dune–where there’s this largely international cast–why are Jürgen Prochnow and Max von Sydow playing, basically, New Yorkers–and an overblown production and a dismal return for the studio.

Dredd‘s problem isn’t so much a lack of money–even the bad effects sequences, like the chase scene, suspend disbelief well enough–but a lousy production frame of reference. I remember when it came out, they tried for a PG-13 and didn’t get one. So instead of an R-rated action movie, you have this R-rated, pseudo-PG-13 action movie… made by Disney of all people.

Stallone’s awful in the kind of personality-free role Schwarzenegger got famous on–Cannon shoots Dredd like he’s either Robocop or the Terminator–and with the blue contact lenses, it somehow doesn’t even look like him.

When the best performance in a film is von Sydow, it’s not a surprise. When the second best performance is Rob Schneider… that situation’s different.

Diane Lane’s bad. Armand Assante doesn’t chew scenery well. Joan Chen is bad. Prochnow’s awful. It’s a ninety-some minute disaster, only tolerable because it is only ninety-some minutes and it does have really high production values.

It’s wrong-headed. I rarely use that term, but Dredd‘s wrong-headed.

First Blood (1982, Ted Kotcheff)

Maybe if it weren’t for the Stephen J. Cannell television techniques (cars flying through the air or exploding on impact), the asinine, comedic banter between the deputies, some poor writing and Richard Crenna, First Blood might have been okay. Ted Kotcheff isn’t a good director though, so maybe not. Kotcheff shoots exteriors well (the stuff a second unit could have also done), but his composition for actors is simplistic and his director of the actors is terrible. Crenna’s role is just idiotically written, but both Stallone and Brian Dennehy careen from good to bad and not all their writing is bad; Kotcheff was just a terrible fit.

First Blood‘s actually kind of boring, mostly because it wastes all of its potential. The opening with Stallone visiting a friend off a beautiful lake really works, because it gets across the idea Rambo smiles when he sees children play. That characterization of Rambo doesn’t hold up through the entire movie and it’s a real problem. Anyway, after the opening, there’s the whole small town cops hassle Rambo stuff. Those scenes have some potential. Not a lot, because the transition from the sensitive Rambo who comforts an angry woman isn’t there. But David Caruso’s good as the sympathetic young deputy and Dennehy’s sheriff is still just a Western bad guy (the big mistake is later, when the script tries to give him depth).

But then Stallone hops on a motorcycle and starts doing wheelies and all the reality goes whoosh. Of course, after just showing him as a heartless animal, he’s warning people to get out of the way of the motorcycle on the sidewalk. Then there’s the long sequence in the forest, with awful cinematography. Then Richard Crenna shows up and is terrible and then a bunch of other stuff, then the ending Gremlins seems to have ripped off a little (it’s okay, since First Blood stole a lot from Raiders of the Lost Ark).

All the while, Jerry Goldsmith’s absurd score booms. Goldsmith appears to have never seen First Blood and is instead scoring an action movie with motorcycles. Oh, wait….

Stallone really does try during some of the scenes, but it doesn’t work. His big monologue is nowhere near as effective as when he tells some guy to get out of a speeding truck. Some of his wordless grunting scenes are bad, but most of his stuff is just boring–the movie probably spends fifteen minutes with him walking silently through a mine.

Nothing, of course, compares to that terrible end credit song, which is horrific. Sadly, the moment just before the song starts, Goldsmith’s score is for one second appropriate and First Blood actually seems all right. Then the song starts.

Daylight (1996, Rob Cohen)

Stallone is Kit Latura, disgraced EMS chief (he cared too much). Besides the name, Stallone’s just the disaster movie lead and not even any interesting one (besides the caring too much). There aren’t even any Stallone grunts in the movie and he plays it straight and as well as anyone can play the terrible script. Daylight is a terrible attempt at a disaster movie as it forgets a couple of the golden rules of the genre. First, have a recognizable cast. Jay O. Sanders might barely qualify, but whoever plays his wife (Karen Young–and she’s awful) is not. And the less said about Sage Stallone the better. The second broken rule is to make the characters likable. With the exception of Stallone and security guard Stan Shaw, there isn’t a single sympathetic character trapped in the (unnamed) tunnel. In fact, when Viggo Mortensen dies, it’s a relief, since it’d have been awful to spend the rest of the movie with him around.

Besides the plotting problems, the script’s generally awful–bad dialogue, bad characters–but Daylight‘s not abjectly bad. Rob Cohen is a boring director, but he’s not bad. The sets are all very intricate and impressive (the other visual effects, terrible CG and silly composites, are not), even if the action occurring on them is mediocre at best.

When he’s not spouting off terrible character development dialogue, Stallone’s keeping the movie going. At the beginning, when it’s amusingly ludicrous, he gets some help from Dan Hedaya. Then, in the tunnel, a little from Shaw. Eventually, he’s got to push ahead himself and, at that point, Daylight gets particularly long. Maybe it’s because the ending is straight out of The Goonies.

Randy Edelman’s score is awful, Amy Brenneman is awful, Barry Newman is hilariously awful. Trina McGee is okay in one of the smaller roles and Vanessa Bell Calloway’s fake Caribbean accent (it goes in and out of course)–at least makes her scenes funny.

It’s funny to think of disaster movies as a complicated art form, but Daylight certainly proves they’re far from easy to make successful.

Rambo III (1988, Peter MacDonald)

According to IMDb, Rambo III was the most expensive movie ever made at the time of its release. It shows. Enormous sets, lots of vehicles–Rambo versus a helicopter, Rambo versus a tank, Rambo in a tank versus a helicopter. For all the money, it ought to look fantastic–except director Peter MacDonald, a camera operator and second unit director… composes like a second unit director and camera operator. It’s incredibly boring to watch, no matter what’s actually going on. MacDonald shoots wide shots and long shots and close-ups of Stallone. For the majority of the movie, nothing else. His direction drains any energy the film might have.

With this one, Stallone changes it up a lot. Most importantly, the politics are essentially gone and the movie really does try for some humanism by giving a face to the Afghani people during the Soviet invasion. When Richard Crenna goes and calls it Russia’s Vietnam, however, the metaphors and similes get confused (Rambo is siding against the imperialist invader… siding with people who get illicit support from a superpower). But, whatever. They’re trying and, with the exception of the really cute and precocious thirteen-year-old soldier, they do okay.

The second change-up is between Stallone and Crenna. Rambo III is a buddy flick with all the wisecracks and the one or two moments of awkward tenderness between macho men. Crenna’s actually not as bad as usual in this one, the humor making his hammy performance acceptable. And Stallone’s better too… even if he looks out of place and not just because of his poofed out eighties hair. Rambo the character doesn’t transition well from the previous entries, as serious and terribly flawed as they are, to a superhero. There’s an emptiness to the desert landscape–it affects the visual of Stallone in his headband and MacDonald doesn’t know how to adjust for it.

So, the goofy action and the bad puns between Crenna and Stallone and the humanism make Rambo III an okay diversion. It’s a precursor to the bigger, louder Carolco action movies. The movie’s almost all action for the second half–including one good sequence in a cave–which is nice, because MacDonald can’t do tension and whenever villain Marc de Jonge is onscreen, the movie becomes nearly unbearable. De Jonge is something terrible… but the movie itself is nearly okay.

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985, George P. Cosmatos)

Rambo‘s pretty awful. It’s not terrible–not too terrible to watch anyway (at least once, though New York Times critic A.O. Scott should probably be fired for supporting it to any degree). The main technical fault lies with George P. Cosmatos, who somehow managed to stock the crew with capable people (editor Mark Goldblatt is no slouch and Jack Cardiff–you know, the Archer’s cinematographer–shot it), but can’t shoot an action scene, establishing shot, anything. The second unit stuff of the helicopters is the best composition in the movie. The next big problem, then, lies with the script. And not even Stallone’s political commentary, which I’ll save for its own paragraph. No, the problem with the script is the movie’s mostly action after fifty minutes. Forty or so minutes of chase scenes and shooting and explosions. None of these things, of course, look good. Cosmatos is awful at shooting them.

Next problem, the cast. Richard Crenna’s terrible, Charles Napier’s terrible, Martin Kove’s terrible, Julia Nickson-Soul is terrible. Steven Berkoff’s poorly directed but he at least appears to be having fun. Stallone’s okay for some of it… not when he’s talking, not when he’s romancing Nickson-Soul. But when he’s running around, he’s okay. Not when he’s got the big gun either. It just looks too absurd.

As for the film’s politics, they’re incredibly confused (if strangely well-meaning). So confused–and the movie is such an absurd vehicle for political commentary–it’s hard to take them seriously. Stallone pushes and pulls in every direction. Each one of Rambo’s painful moments of political insight is invalidated by the next and it’s somewhat offensive–given the whole movie is about POWs still in Vietnam–Stallone takes the spotlight for himself at the end, instead of acknowledging–in the movie’s reality–there are a dozen or so men about to go home after twenty years in a prison camp.

Luckily, Rambo’s final speech is so dumb and brother Frank Stallone’s song is so awful, it’s impossible to dwell much on Rambo: First Blood Part II… thinking too hard about it, trying to unravel Stallone’s contradictory ideas, trying to understand why Rambo falls in love with Nickson-Soul in four and a half seconds… it hurts the brain.

Rambo (2008, Sylvester Stallone)

First, I need to get the theater-going experience out of the way. I do not remember the last time I’ve been in a theater filled with stupider people. They did not shower for the most part. Their girlfriends had to explain the complicated parts to them. I can only imagine what seeing Rambo III would have been like for people with IQs above eighty-five back when the series was popular.

On to the film.

Stallone tries hard to give Rambo the Rocky Balboa treatment and he succeeds on a few levels. He really gets across how awful things in Burma are going–the genocide. He manages to make it the setting, not turning the film into an infomercial. It’s impressive. The more important level is the character himself. In a very poorly constructed voiceover, Stallone eradicates the “Rambo the tortured Vietnam vet” thing he’s had going for twenty-five years. Rambo, Stallone decides, kills people because he likes it (which might not sound like much, but just imagine a Lethal Weapon or Die Hard featuring that thesis about its protagonist). Stallone’s observation, of course, would be a heck of a lot more profound if the movie worked out in the end….

Stallone doesn’t find the balance between action movie and thoughtful observation in Rambo, because he plays toward a general realism. It’s not Rambo running around the jungle trying to save the missionaries by himself, there’s a team of mercenaries with him. Of these mercenaries, Matthew Marsden and Graham McTavish give the best performances. As for the missionaries, Paul Schulze is surprisingly bad and Julie Benz is fine. Benz kind of plays Fay Wray to Stallone’s Kong. It’s a wonderful relationship to watch, because Stallone really gets how to make it work.

So, oddly, the problem becomes Stallone’s unwillingness to go the distance, to have a crazy action movie with Rambo running around killing bad guys (and these bad guys are bad… the worst bad guys I can remember seeing in such numbers in a movie). He goes for something resembling realism and the movie loses out. It’s not dumb fun. It’s dumb pseudo-realistic action violence. Stallone’s very big on showing how awful violence is in the film, it’s graphic and it’s intense.

Rambo, the character, doesn’t deserve the Rocky Balboa treatment–the redefined sequel treatment–because there’s just not enough of a character there. The proof is easily identifiable–Rambo‘s lame closing scene. But it seems like there’s a good mix–and Stallone finds it quite a few times in the movie… he just can’t sustain it.

Avenging Angelo (2002, Martyn Burke)

Avenging Angelo plays like a Sandra Bullock comedy from the late 1990s, except it’s Madeleine Stowe in the Bullock role and… I don’t know Stallone in the Keanu Reeves role, if Keanu Reeves did romantic comedies. Maybe still-on-“ER” George Clooney or someone. There aren’t any Italian movie stars in Hollywood right now… oh, obviously, Antonio Banderas playing an Italian. Anyway, instead of Bullock and Banderas, it’s Stowe and Stallone, which makes Avenging Angelo all of a sudden a very different romantic comedy. First, it’s a romantic comedy about the Mafia; that genre is rarely explored. But the reason it works as a romantic Mafia comedy is because of the second different aspect… Stallone and Stowe aren’t young. Stowe being a bored wealthy housewife on Long Island makes a lot of sense. Stallone as the bodyguard who’s always been too busy protecting Stowe (without her knowing, of course) to have a life of his own. Too little of the time lost angle is discussed in the film–it’s way too subtle, to the point I almost suspect the writers never went in and made it age appropriate for Stowe and Stallone, leaving it for Bullock and Banderas or whoever.

Stallone pretty much makes the movie; it’s clear from the beginning, he’s having a great time, whether it’s working with Anthony Quinn (in these scenes, Stallone doesn’t even bother acting, just spends them enjoying Quinn’s company) or doing the romantic comedy lead. The movie’s not long, so the first act is when Stowe actually has the most character-defining acting to do and she’s fine. There’s not much of a role (her husband is a louse, she misses her kid, her life is boring and shallow) for her to work with, but, since it’s a short movie, pretty soon she’s in full romantic comedy lead mode too.

A film made in 2002, Avenging Angelo has as much use of songs for background music as one made in 1988. There are at least six of these montages and the film’s got a nice Bill Conti score, so either the script really didn’t have enough going on (as it plays, the film’s sub-plotless) or Conti was just too busy… or I suppose they wanted to have enough for a soundtrack release?

Being a romantic comedy, the film hinges on Stallone and Stowe’s chemistry and they’re good together, but it’s understandable why the film didn’t get a theatrical release. Stowe never recovered from her disappearance from the screen in the late 1990s (at the height of her career) and Stallone’s fans never went for his comedic turns… and it reminded me a lot of Faithful (the comedy with Chazz Palminteri and Cher)–down to the action being centered around two people in a house. And no one ever asked for another Faithful….

But, all in all, it’s a pleasant, traditional romantic comedy. Perfectly fine.

Nighthawks (1981, Bruce Malmuth)

Catherine Mary Stewart’s British? She’s in Nighthawks for a second and she looked familiar but I don’t keep track of her filmography, so I didn’t find out until the end credits. (Actually, she’s Canadian, which is closer than I thought). Besides that trivia tidbit–if it even qualifies as a tidbit–the most amusing thing about Nighthawks is the name of the good guy’s anti-terrorism task force (A.T.A.C., get it?). They wear navy blue jumpsuits and have caps. Their headquarters is a huge garage. Maybe a warehouse.

Nighthawks is amusing in its stupidity, but only to a certain point. The film doesn’t seem to appreciate its awfulness. It’s ludicrously written, at least with Stallone and Billy Dee Williams as the cops. The Rutger Hauer scenes are a little bit better (most of the film is all Hauer, which is fine). When Nigel Davenport shows up at the beginning, I remember hoping he would only be in it for a cameo, but then he comes back in and is terrible for more. Oh, and Joe Spinell is terrible. I almost forgot about him.

Besides the script, which is incompetent, the film’s director, Bruce Malmuth, is bad in the most uninteresting ways. He can’t create a mood, can’t direct actors, can’t compose shots. Stallone’s got a few good scenes, actually, but the stuff between him and Williams range in quality. A few times, you can see Stallone trying to get more screen time and it doesn’t really work for the characters, who are apparently friends (though it’s hard to know; Nighthawks doesn’t have much in the way of backstory–it’s all exposition getting toward the final scene). When it finally does get to be Stallone’s turn, when he really does have to do really well… he fails, but it’s not like it was going to turn Nighthawks around. It was going to be terrible–the scene itself terrible too–no matter what.

I can’t forget to say something about the extraordinary score–Keith Emerson doesn’t get how to score a movie. Whatsoever. Nighthawks probably wouldn’t have been any better with a real score, but at least it wouldn’t induce laughter….

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Bruce Malmuth; screenplay by David Shaber, based on a story by Shaber and Paul Sylbert; director of photography, James A. Contner; edited by Stanford C. Allen and Christopher Holmes; music by Keith Emerson; production designer, Peter S. Larkin; produced by Herb Nanas and Martin Poll; released by Universal Pictures.

Starring Sylvester Stallone (Det. Sgt. Deke DaSilva), Billy Dee Williams (Det. Sgt. Matthew Fox), Lindsay Wagner (Irene), Persis Khambatta (Shakka Holland), Nigel Davenport (Peter Hartman), Rutger Hauer (Wulfgar), Hilary Thompson (Pam) and Joe Spinell (Lt. Munafo).

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Rocky Balboa (2006, Sylvester Stallone)

I’m fairly sure there’s never been a film like Rocky Balboa before. The closest is probably Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Rocky Balboa is about its story and its characters, but it’s also about the audience’s pre-exisiting relationship not with the characters, but with Rocky movies as a piece of history. Stallone uses this relationship early and sparsely, to establish Balboa as something worth watching. Once he’s done, he moves on to more interesting things, but Balboa maintains a mystique about it. The idea of a movie character aging in a film’s absence is one infrequently dealt with and usually poorly (The Color of Money). As a concept, it ought to work. (Clint Eastwood once said he’d do a ‘Dirty Harry Goes Fishing’ sequel). But Rocky Balboa is the first time I can think of it’s worked and it works really, really well. It’s easily the best film of the series (which, minus the first one, isn’t hard).

The boxing aspect of Rocky Balboa comes in so late, it’s actually unimportant to what’s going on in the movie itself. If Rocky had been a bowling champion, it’d be the same degree. Well, maybe not bowling. Arm-wrestling maybe. (I can’t remember the name of Stallone’s arm-wrestling movie). He’s old and he’s alone and it’s about him working his way out of a long rut, trying to reform a family around himself. When the boxing finally does come along, it seems like it might not even–if it weren’t a Rocky movie–go anywhere.

Stallone directs Balboa quieter than I’ve seen anyone direct a modern film in a long time. It’s a loving, patient approach and it works beautifully. Only when it gets to the boxing match, shot to look like a televised bout (on DV), does the film lose that understated beauty. Watching it, I wondered if Stallone intended it to look different because it actually was so removed from the rest of the film. I also wondered if it’d look different on DVD, once everything had been digitized. During the boxing match Stallone stumbles a little, trying to find the right way to present the story in film. These stumbles are never annoying though, just visible.

The acting from the principles is great–Stallone’s very aware of what he can and can not do and he only gives himself the stuff he can do. Similarly, Burt Young’s got a bunch of great stuff to do too. Geraldine Hughes plays a grown-up version of a character from the first film and she’s fantastic. Antonio Tarver is fine as the adversary, with some too weak scenes but enough to be a problem. As Rocky Jr., Milo Ventimiglia acts a little bit too much with his styled hair, but Stallone does a lot of work in those scenes and carries him through. The other scenes Ventimiglia’s in, he needs to look like a men’s watch model and manages. The stuff between Stallone and Young is great, but familiar. The stuff between Stallone and Hughes is great and new and somehow more rewarding, because this relationship is what kick-starts Rocky Balboa‘s story.

Going in to Balboa, I wasn’t expecting much. I was expecting something decent or at least inoffensively watchable, but certainly not something great. It was a really nice and totally unbelievable surprise.