There may be no actor alive today who has managed to survive as many bad films as Sylvester Stallone. For that matter, few stars have survived being an indifferent actor with as much panache; certainly no one in the history of cinema has as endearingly triumphed over being so mediocre an actor/writer/director. I like the man: with 25 starring vehicles in 20 years—14 of which he wrote and five of which he directed himself—Sly is the lumpen filmgoer’s very own renaissance dude.
Alas, fate has not been as kind to Stallone lately, as a quick viewing of Daylight—released on video this week—will attest. Daylight is not the ideal stripped-to-the-waist Stallone vehicle: Sly’s hero is somewhat subdued and unsure of himself, and his performance fails to distract you from the sinking feeling that what you are watching is not much more than a remake of The Poseidon Adventure. It has most of the old Irwin Allen thumbprints: It’s set in a collapsed automobile tunnel between New York City and New Jersey; it’s got fires and rising water; and it’s got a supporting cast of caterwauling idiots who appear to have been locked up in a room and forced to watch The Towering Inferno for about six weeks. It’s got everything except Shelly Winters, and she is profoundly missed.
She is missed almost as much as the loud, over-the-top Stallone character that used to be Sly’s sole stock-in-trade. It was the one thing he did that was fun to watch and it has been largely missing from his recent work. It is as if he became suddenly embarrassed to be making $20 million a picture just for doing what comes naturally, wanted to try his hand at real acting, and the studio hacks were dumb enough to give him a shot.
It is perhaps the most expensive failed experiment in recent Hollywood memory. Sly’s crisis-of-conscience cop in Daylight and the quieter, gentler killers he is asked to play in movies like The Specialist and Assassins and are simply boring. When Stallone is quiet, he disappears; he needs to be noisy in noisy movies, going hand-to-hand and chin-to-chin with monsters or machines or flamboyant bad guys even bigger and more obnoxious than he.
You can boil it down to a rule: If it would look out of place on the cover of a Marvel comic book, he shouldn’t do it. In Daylight he pulls extras and supporting players around a set, argues, and looks worried. It’s a role that would give even a real actor trouble; getting Sly to do the existential shtick is like asking Shopenhauer to write the first draft of Die Hard.
He is not much fun to watch in The Specialist, either, playing a free-lance bomb designer who spends a lot of time communicating with other people through e-mail—the cinematic equivalent of watching paint flake off a stove. Stallone characters should never be given a quiet profession: You don’t ask Batman to run a soup-kitchen and you don’t ask Sly to operate a laptop computer and furrow his brow. The only interesting bit he participates in personally in The Specialist is a bit of clutch-and-grab with Sharon Stone in a hot shower, where he and Stone appear to be comparing pecs. (He wins.)
Ironically, the producers have chosen to give the bulging-eyes-and-neck part in The Specialist to Rod Steiger, who single-handedly almost saves the picture by delivering Hollywood's most preposterous racial impersonation in years—a Cuban Mafioso, decked out with a Frito Bandito accent where "you" is pronounced "Jew". The scriptwriters then sprinkle the word "You" into his lines like grass seed: "Jew want to kill me, Jew bastard? Well, Jew gonna die!" It sounds like an anti-Semitic rant every time he opens his mouth.
There is no such levity to save Assassins—bad guy Antonio Bandaris really is Spanish and for the most part leaves his accent in the dressing room. Once again, Stallone is virtually inaudible and invisible, leaving the viewer to ponder some of the movie’s more questionable conceits—like casting Vanya on 42nd Street’s Julianne Moore as an action heroine. This proves a less satisfactory experiment than its converse might have been, i.e., casting Stallone as, say, Uncle Vanya or Richard III. (Actually, it’s a shame Al Pacino didn’t bring Sly along for a few scenes in his Looking for Richard. It would be interesting to see Richard III given the Stallone twisted-lip and knotted-temple treatment: Imagine Rambo declaiming “now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,” and try to keep a shiver of excitement from running up and down your spine.)
It would work, I swear it: With the iconic Stallone acting at full steam, there is no good or bad performance; no appropriate or inappropriate role; the jollies you get from Sly as Richard III are exactly the jollies you’d get from Sly as Rambo III. It’s an in-joke on the part of a pectoral type with the gift of self awareness; an actor who knows that—like Rocky’s—his stardom is a fluke, a cosmic joke not to be taken very seriously.
When he moves outside the icon, he vanishes; he’s not fun to watch any more. The unfortunate trend established by his last few movies looks likely to reach some kind of apotheosis in this summer’s Copland, a serious actor project for which he’s gained weight and surrounded himself with people like Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro. His performance in Copland promises to be restrained, earnest, and nothing that a hundred other real actors couldn’t do a lot better. Copland is not just the end of an era, it’s three movies past the end of an era.
I think I’ll prefer to remember Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd—a lousy movie but the archetypal Stallone performance: overblown, overwrought—most of the time it looks as if the cords in his neck are about to explode—and over-everything. Judge Dredd is the most splendid Stallone performance of all for a very simple reason: in a movie full of bombs going off, property destruction without end, and a soundtrack designed to make your ears bleed, Sly is still the biggest, loudest thing on the screen. We shall not hear his like again.
—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996
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