8th
Mike Robertson on Sylvester Stallone: A Sad Waste of Talent
This is pretty random, but during a recent visit to Ross Dress for Less, of all places, I found a rack full of $4.50 DVDs. They were mostly castoff full-screen versions of older movies that have been re-released as Director’s Cuts or on Blue Ray or whatever new formatting they’re trying to foist on us now.
Most of the selection was pretty crappy, but I did find Lords of Dogtown (which made me unexpectedly sad about Heath Ledger) and Bottle Rocket (which made me unexpectedly sad about how Wes Anderson used to be good). I also, inexplicably, bought a copy of Rocky.
As is the nature of the impulse buy, when I got home I couldn’t remember why I’d bought Rocky. I don’t especially like Sylvester Stallone. I was assigned to review his newest Rambo movie a while back, and left the theater feeling a bit queasy, like I’d been rubbing up against a sweaty dude for ninety minutes. The list is too long to reproduce (the man has 55 credits on IMDB, for crying out loud) but here’s a short list of cinematic travesties old Sly has visited upon us: Rhinestone, Cobra, Tango & Cash, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Demolition Man, Judge Dredd, and Rocky III, IV and V (I haven’t seen the newest one). And these are just the major ones that made obscene amounts of cash.
But, being human, I didn’t want to just leave Rocky in its wrapper. I felt obligated to watch it again (I paid $4.50!), so I did.
And it’s actually pretty good.
I’m exaggerating my surprise, of course. I’ve seen Rocky before, and I know it’s the best of the bunch. But it made me think about how Stallone went from being nobody in 1974 in Lords of Flatbush (his first semi-major credit; his first credit from 1970 is called The Party at Kitty and Stud’s, which by all accounts is a really bad soft-core porno) to being the Main Attraction of 1976. After Rocky and the two or three movies he had in the works at the time, Stallone became a Headliner, someone whose name is printed above the movie’s title, and in larger letters. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Stephen Segal, et al, Stallone stopped being an actor and became an Icon, a Box Office Draw, and Action Hero.
But unlike those other guys, Stallone can actually act (you can argue about Arnold if you want, but you’ll have to do it by yourself). Stallone also wrote the screenplay for Rocky, and as far as I can tell, it was his own idea. He also adapted First Blood for the screen (which in many ways is pretty good, too). But what struck me about Rocky is that most of the bombastic hoo-ha from his action movies, including Rocky’s sequels, is missing. It’s actually a character-driven, ensemble-cast story about poor people who actually catch a freakin’ break for once. The cast includes the prolific Burt Young (126 credits!), Talia Shire, Carl Weathers, and the great Burgess Meredith. What’s more important is that the cast works together in Rocky. They all have their own equal share of the pathos-pie, and each character’s particular set of problems serves to illustrate the central theme of transcendence-through-struggle. That theme has actually been pretty threadbare and hokey for like a hundred years, but the fact Stallone’s script makes it seem fresh again is impressive.
My point is that it’s too bad Stallone became so “successful.” And by “successful,” I mean Stallone becoming the Big Star he became. In later installments of the Rocky series, Paulie, Adrian, Apollo and Mickey came back only to play second fiddle to the Rock’s dorky repeating self-doubt issues, and the whole thing takes on a forced self-conscious lameness. I think if Rocky hadn’t been the cash cow it was, Stallone would have gone on to make more quality work, rather than wasting his time (and ours) on stuff like Over the Top.
I only have a couple of examples, a couple of glittering Stallone-jewels peeking out of the celluloid compost that is his career to back up this theory. The first is First Blood, which seems like an earnest attempt to create something with social and moral connotations for Americans in the post-Viet Nam period (the credit for which, really, should go to the novel’s author David Morrell). Plus, it’s got Brian Dennehy. Like the Rocky character, after the first movie John Rambo became a cartoon character, performing crazier and more unlikely feats of skilled murder as he aged (again, see the new one. It’s really gross.).
My second example is Cop Land, from 1997. Cop Land got a lot of good reviews at the time, but in the long run it seems to have been more or less lost in the shuffle. Stallone plays Sheriff Freddie Heflin, a sad sack guy who lives across the river from NYC, playing pinball and hanging out. He once aspired to be one of New York’s finest, but partially lost his hearing while saving a girl from drowning as a teenager. A bunch of real New York cops (including Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Robert Patrick) move into Heflin’s town and basically ignore him while they police it themselves. When it turns out they’re all corrupt as hell, Heflin has to pull it together and take them down.
This is really good stuff. Again, when put in an ensemble cast with a good, character-driven story, Stallone shows he can work with others and deliver a believable performance. Stallone even gained some weight for Cop Land, and creates a doofy, sympathetic character that in no way resembles the snake catching, throat-slitting Rambo or the friendly-dog tenacity of Rocky Balboa.
I guess the point of all this is that money ruins most everything. Stallone made the obvious, sensible, “American” choice by choosing to make semi-putrid dreck for insane amounts of money instead of developing his skill as an actor. We’ll never know if Stallone could have been a Great Actor like De Niro or Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to imagine he could have been at least as good as say, Viggo Mortensen or Ray Liotta, maybe even Harvey Keitel. Those guys ride (or in Liotta’s case, rode) the line between respected actor and box office draw, and they seem to be well-fed and groomed enough. They may not have a bazillion dollars to buy a diamond-plated wet bar (that’s pure speculation, I admit), but I get the feeling that twenty or thirty years down the road Stallone will be a jokey cinematic footnote, while many of his contemporaries will have a decent body of work.