Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot

After you watch this film, you can only wish that Stallone’s mom did in fact shoot. Shoot Stallone. At birth.

Then again, the executive decision to pair Stallone with Estelle Getty could also be seen as a visionary piece of creative casting. On Bizarro world, that is. On Earth, it should cause you to suffer from a fatal embolism, then get you fired from your job.

Getty, who was enjoying a career popularity generated by geriatric people on their deathbeds watching Golden Girls, was an obvious choice for “Mom�. She was talented, beautiful, and please let me go kill myself now.

Seriously, I don’t know what they were thinking. I’ve read a few books about Hollywood producers and directors and the system, and even though as William Goldman famously said “Nobody knows anything�, I can’t for the life of me figure out what they possible had in mind with this concept. Where in its demented script did it scream “BOX OFFICE CHAMPION!� on the page and not... say... �MAKE THIS FILM AND BE BANISHED TO HELL YOU DEMENTED BASTARDS!� instead?

"Hey Joe, do you think 'man-love' is wrong? Joe? Whaddya think Joe? Huh?"

Let’s take a look at the story. Stallone, fresh off the success of Othello 2: Othello’s Revenge, plays Burt Bacharach, a gung-ho single cop with relationship issues, a bad haircut and a droopy bottom lip. He had a thing going for his boss (JoBeth Williams) but she brought that to an end when she realised he was emotionally retarded and had a speech defect and couldn’t piss in the bowl either. If life didn’t suck enough for Burt, his Mom (Estelle Getty) is making good on her threat to visit and stay for a while. Mom is a meddling old bitch who can’t stop flapping her gums and embarrassing Sly, showing the airline stewardesses his baby photos and interfering with his work by lambasting a guy threatening to jump off a building. When she tries to buy Burt a gun as a present, she witnesses a shooting and withholds important info from the cops so she can team up with Burt to investigate the case instead, hoping that it will get him promoted, save his relationship and teach him the true meaning of Christmas. I don’t like Christmas, I like getting presents but I don’t like going to stupid crowded stinking hot smelly shopping centres at the last moment, so this year I got my shopping out the way early. Now I can get drunk a lot more in the weeks before Christmas, which I’m certain is what Santa wanted us to do, not watch shitty Stallone films or shop. In fact, when Santa wrote the Ten Commandments, I’m sure that “Thou shalt not watch Stallone films sober� was number 11, but the editor couldn’t trim enough words from the other ten to fit it on. If Amy was editing the Ten Commandments, she would have got at least 22 on those stones, and maybe even had them bulk emailed out as well to all our readers. Amy is a good editor, this review alone used to be 82,000 words long. Look how good it reads now. Amy she good at edit fings. Her nevr missus a misteak. (Hmm... Ed.)

So, let’s face it, Stallone has made some dire shit. Ha ha ha, sorry, did I say “some�? Ha ha, I meant to say “He’s made a lot of dire shit�. His more recent efforts are straight to video junk that you’ve never heard of, and if you ever watched them your testicles would pop. It’s a sad state of affairs for a guy who was once considered Box Office Gold. Now he’s Box Office Ebola. Anything with his name attached is doomed to bleed to death from the anus and destroy the careers of anyone else attached, in a shitstorm of negativity and liquified intestines.

"10-4, 10-4, I think my incontinence pad has exploded. Send backup and a sponge!"

There’s a very real possibility that this film, and maybe a few dozen others, are responsible for his current state of banishment from the inner circle of popularity. Regardless of what a lot of commentators say, I doubt it’s because the movie going audience suddenly developed more sophisticated cinematic tastes during the '90s. There’s still a huge number of by-the-book idiot-targeted films made every year that could hardly be called ‘intellectual’. I think we’re still as dumb as ever, but we’re trying harder to conceal it by attending more arthouse films, using terms like ‘Dogme 95’ more (like we really know what it means or we even really care) and telling strangers that Tarkovsky’s original Solaris was a far more satisfying film than Soderbergh’s Americanised butt fest. Yeah, and like three years ago you even knew who the hell Tarkovsky was. Get a grip, you’re not fooling anyone but yourself.

You see I think Stallone fell from grace because we the public felt embarrassed for making him such a huge star in the first place. Sure, it didn’t help that he made crap, but it was really when we started to realise what we had done with the likes of him, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, Lundgren, Seagal and any other meat head with dialogue consisting of monosyllabic grunts, that we felt degraded and ashamed and stupid. We had made Gods out of lunks who glorified violence, who showed us that death could be funny as long as you had a snappy one-liner to go with it, who made our leaders believe that a war could be won as long as you had Hollywood on your side and a strategically torn singlet to don whenever you had to go ‘take out the trash�. Then, we decided to stay away from their films, we never admitted to friends that we ever enjoyed them in the past, and we shoved our embarrassment into the closet alongside our repressed memories of watching Neighbours every night before tea, our fascination with the young Dannii Minogue, our well-worn pair of bubblegum jeans, power hair, shoulder-pads, ‘Right Said Fred‘-style fishnet singlets and runners with Velcro straps instead of laces.

Stallone et al woke up one morning after years of disastrous box office takes and said “Don’t they love me anymore?�

We did, but we didn’t want them or anyone else to know it. Shame on us.

Then again, maybe he just really sucks and makes lots of bad films.

It’s hard to get excited over so lacklustre a film, and perhaps that’s a fair description of the pic as well. Actually, that’s not fair on the transfer, because it’s not terrible by any means, looking reasonably clean for the vintage, the typical scratches, flecks and whatnots peppering the print here and there, and with a few moments where it looks quite good. Colours are fine, if a little oversaturated from time to time, and the shadow detail is left a bit wanting, but when the ships come home and it’s time to pay the piper for his rats, all things being equal this is... okay.

This was a Dolby Surround mix originally, now in Dolby Digital 5.1 the results fare little better than before. Front to back movement, general ambience and clarity is limp, lacking effort and placement spatially. Predominately front heavy, the action scenes (if you can call them that) offer up a little more action, but nothing beyond the norm. I guess this is just another mix where the move up to split rears didn’t offer up anything different from the original soundtrack. Like the video assessment, this gets a passing grade, but still needs to buckle down and work harder if it wants to make it into university.

No extra features at all. Thank you, baby Jesus!

I don’t know why Stallone made this film, but then I don’t really care either. Like it or lump it, the film is a dog, as is the comprehensiveness of this DVD release. I’m sure no-one wants a commentary by Estelle Getty anyway, besides she’s probably dead now. Or should be. Anyway, even if this DVD had a comm you can bet your butt I wouldn’t have bothered listening to it.