Cobra (R)

Oh, this movie is so bad! Cobra – in this movie is Lieutenant Marion Cobrretti (Sylvester Stallone), an above the law cop in what appears to be Miami. The opening sequence establishes him as such. He’s called in by his superiors to quell a madman rampaging through a grocery story who has killed a hostage. “Crime is disease,” Cobra mutters before icing the perp. “I’m the cure.” 

The tough-guy cop schtick is no new routine, and you can’t blame Stallone (who co-wrote the screenplay with Paula Gosling), for trying. Gosling wrote the novel, called “A Running Duck,” and Stallone, coming off the heels of “Rambo: First Blood Part II” was certainly enamored by the idea of a rogue cop stopping a violent gang. But the film fails miserably. It wants to be several films – most notably “Dirty Harry,” but has none of the suspense, none of the buildup, and none of the character development that made that film great.

Stallone is here joined by a group of actors that have been in movies of varying success. As a by-the-book superior, we see Andrew Robinson (who played the villain in “Dirty Harry” and an inconsequential cuckhold in “Hellraiser“), as well as Art Lafleur (“Field of Dreams”) as a police captain with about ten lines in the whole movie. Brigette Nielson (“Rocky III”) joins as a damsel in distress. Not much else of consequence can be said here.

The basic premise is a street gang is murdering innocent civilians around town in grotesque fashion. The police think it’s a lone killer called “The Night Slasher,” and even when Cobra, who’s seen several perps attacking a lone victim tells them its more than one, they disbelieve him. The plot requires this. Cobra is a ‘clean-em-up’ type that the police bring in when they can’t afford to get their public image dirty. They need him and resent him simultaneously.

Along the way we see a lot of sinister meetings of the ‘gang’ clinking axes together in some sort of ritualistic
fashion (think Manson family), and one neanderthal (played by Brian Thompson), who makes the nordic, chiseled features of the terrorists from “Die Hard” look conservative. He carries a long knife with a spiked handle and he’s so mean! We see him dispatch of many women and men in reckless fashion with no remorse. But one woman sees his crime and gets away (Neilson), and he will have none of that. “She’s mine,” he promises.

The movie is way too short at 90 minutes, and seems over before it started. Probably it’s worst offense is that there is zero buildup for any of the characters. Cobra walks around with a perpetual match in his mouth, but aside from that, we learn nothing about him but his first name, which is ‘Marion.’ “I wish I had a tougher name…like Alice,” he jokes to Ingrid (Neilson). The rest of the characters are brushed so thin it’s like flipping through a child’s picture book: this is Ingrid, she running, this is Night Slasher, he’s mean. Etc.

The film has a lot of action, but it doesn’t make any sense. The Night Slasher attacks Cobra and Ingrid in broad daylight, starts a knife fight, starts a highway gun fight. Calls Cobra a pig many times, taunts him because he’s a cop and can’t kill him blah blah blah. Didn’t he ever see “Dirty Harry?” “The law stops with me,” Cobra mutters.

The biggest disappointment of this film is its disjointed structure and wretched script. There’s no segue between scenes, no buildup to fights, and no motive whatsoever for either Cobra’s actions or Night Slasher’s. There’s also little structure among the in-fighting between Cobra and his fellow cops. So much so, that by the time Robinson gets a well deserved punch in the face, it’s so expected and clichéd that we barely bat an eye. It’s like director George P. Cosmatos found a check list of action tropes, hired Stallone, and began checking off a list.

The end is a lot of fighting and punching and gruesome threats, but, unlike better actioners such as “Predator” or the “Rambo” films that preceded this one, land flat and dull. It’s really a shame. Stallone penned scripts for two great movies (“Rocky,” and the latest “Rambo”), but this just feels like an exercise by numbers. The cure for this movie? Don’t bother.

– by Mark Ziobro