Movies in the 1980s gave us enough loose cannon cops to man a small army. They were badasses with badges, high body counts to their name and endlessly exasperated police captains on their case. Drug dealers, illegal arms merchants, gangs of thieves, killers of cop partners and the occasional Eastern European or Russian terrorist were their enemies and all were going down, preferably on rain-slicked city streets and in a big explosion. About the only crimes anyone could get away with in these movies were bad writing, bad acting and bad directing.
On one end of the spectrum, you have Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, in which he’s a wisecracker who makes the film as much a comedy as it is a cop flick. Then on the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got Sylvester Stallone as the 80s’ most over-the-top brooding lawman in Cobra. He wears mirror shades at all times of the day and night, dresses in black, speaks in a low rumble and carries himself like his balls weigh twenty-five pounds each. He wears the same expression whether he’s cleaning his guns, romancing Brigitte Nielsen or setting a guy on fire. It’s the Rambo performance all over again, but this time in sun-scorched Los Angeles.
And, funny thing, all of these decades later, Cobra pretty much plays like a comedy, too.
It hits every cop movie cliche like a breeze through wind chimes and none of it—not one scene—makes a lick of sense. The bad guys here are a gang of murderers and that’s IT. They don’t steal, they don’t smuggle, they don’t work for any mafia—they just kill, kill, kill and they do it randomly. And there’s a whole bunch of them! You could staff a Wal-Mart with this gang’s numbers! Where do they come from? Why are they in this gang? There’s a mild salt sprinkle of a suggestion here that they’re a cult of some sort, but the film spends no more than five seconds on the topic. The makers don’t want to take much time away from their main concern here, which is making Stallone look cool and mysterious (Stallone wrote the script, by the way, based on a Paula Gosling novel). They hard-boil him until all of the water evaporates and he’s burning on the stove.
This is bad. Really, really bad.
And you need to see it. I can’t recommend it enough. Stallone is a top icon of 80s shit cinema here, right up there with Patrick Swayze in Road House and Howard the Duck.