People in the Movie: Sylvester Stallone, Brigitte Nielson, Brian Thompson
Director: George Cosmatos
Pigeonhole: Action / Cop “drama”
The Basics:
Recommendation: There are a few good action scenes, gunfights and a decent car chase, plus some “tough guy” talk, but that is about it. There is little in the way of a plot, character development, or believability. Fortunately the movie is only 87 minutes long. If you’re a Sly Stallone fan, and you like to see the bad guys lose, then enjoy the mindless fun. “R” rating is for violence and language.
My Take: This movie very much plays out like a old western. The lone “good-guy” taking on a plethora of villains, to save the girl. That’s it. That’s the whole movie.
**spoiler alert** Cobra is the embodiment of the “rogue cop who can’t follow the rules” (a favorite moniker of my brother). He is part of the “Zombie Squad”, as his boss verbalizes early in the movie. I am not really sure if this is supposed to mean Cobra works the late shift, or if the suspects he routinely deals with are all low-lifes. He wears mirrored sunglasses, a henley t-shirt, jeans, black leather gloves, black biker boots; he drives a custom built 1950 Mercury, and carries a .45 with a Cobra design on the pearl handle. Unfortunately, beyond his outward appearance, we learn very little about the man.
The Night Slasher is large, menacing, deep-voiced thug that Thompson plays perfectly. What we learn is that he is a leader of a group/cult that mostly resembles a biker gang. They seem fairly mindless, and it appears there is only one female in the whole group. Here is another slightly unclear point; either their group is called New Order, or they believe in a psychotic idealism called New Order. New Order is (or has) a fairly simple theory; they kill the “weak” so the strong survive. There is no other development of the group; the Night Slasher leading them, or instructing them as a cult leader might. The audience is shown a montage of them banging axes over their heads. That must be how they prep for a night out.
So out driving one night after a photo shoot, Ingrid sees the Night Slasher and a few other gang members while they are dumping a body, although she only saw them at the location, she did not see the body, and therefore did not realize she would be in danger. The Night Slasher, seeing her, considers her a witness, so they track her down to kill her, but fail in their attempt. Now under Cobra’s watch it is basically a street battle of him trading gunfire with this gang. It really does not make sense that this whole gang of people would commit themselves to eliminating this one girl.
But, like in most shoot-em-up films like this, the bad guys couldn’t hit an oil tanker with their bullets, and Cobra - sometimes not even aimed at certain bad guys- manages to kill them all. Forget about any attempt to arrest them, these are bikers of the New Order! Or who believe in the New Order! Or something similar.. They need to be shot to death!
Even more absurd is the on screen attempt at Cobra and Ingrid kindling a relationship, and made funnier by the fact that Stallone and Nielson were actually married at the time. It just looked visibly uncomfortable for both of them.
Forgot to mention there is an even a special treat for the Night Slasher, but I won’t ruin that.
The only real tragedy of the film is that Cobra’s Mercury gets wrecked during a car chase. Unless you count the acting …
Final Thought/Extras/For Fun: Cobra was a critical failure, but had a huge box office return… Loosely based on the novel Fair Game, which was spawned into the 1996 film flop Fair Game starring Billy Baldwin and Cindy Crawford…
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