Cobra
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 Too bad this cure's almost as bad as the disease.
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Cobra is a 1986 American action film "directed" (see trivia) by George P. Costamos, and written by Sylvester Stallone, who also starred in the title role (the two previously worked together in 1985's Rambo: First Blood Part II). The film co-stars Reni Santoni, Brigitte Nielsen, and Andrew Robinson. The film was loosely based on the novel Fair Game by Paula Gosling.
Plot
Marion Cobretti, a tough-on-crime street cop, must protect the only surviving witness from a social Darwinistic supremacist group.
Bad Qualities
- Cliched story about a tough cop who has to bend the rules and deal with superiors who are too wimpy to do what it takes to stop a serial killer. Dirty Harry had done this exact storyline far better a whole fifteen years earlier, and was already on the fourth film in its franchise (a fifth would follow the year after this one) by the time this one was released.
- The opening shot - a close-up of the hero slowly pointing his gun of choice towards the camera while giving a narration, before firing the gun - is also ripped off from the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force.
- While the message that cops have to deal with an excessive amount of red tape which gets in the way of them actually doing their job and stopping criminals is arguably a valid one (albeit it had also been done already by Dirty Harry), the movie beats the viewer over the head with this message far too often.
- The movie's tone is all over the place. Cobretti is a wise-cracking cop who constantly makes all kinds of bad jokes (many of which were recycled from when Stallone was set to appear in Beverly Hills Cop), but the main villain is an incredibly dark, psychopathic killer.
- Intrusive product placement, particularly for Pepsi, which has advertisements splashed all around the movie, and even has Cobretti stop to drink a can during the opening action sequence.
- While none of the action sequences are really bad (in fact, several of them are quite decent), they're mostly pretty generic ones that you'd see in any other 80s action movie.
- After the first action sequence, there's a pointlessly long scene of Cobretti sitting at home and doing some maintenance on his gun.
- Aside from Cobretti and the Night Slasher, the characters are all bland stereotypes.
- For absolutely no reason that's ever explained, other than the story otherwise wouldn't be able to move forward, one of Cobretti's fellow officers is a double agent working for the bad guys.
- The entire plot is only allowed to happen because the Night Slasher is too stupid to bother wearing any form of disguise while he murders people.
- An excessive number of montage sequences that take place over pop songs, probably inspired by Stallone's Rocky IV from the previous year.
- In the end, the Night Slasher decides to surrender himself, but Cobretti decides to just kill him because he doesn't trust the courts to convict him. Even though not only did they already have one credible witness beforehand, but the Night Slasher committed dozens of other murders in full view of the police immediately beforehand, meaning that there's no way on earth any court would fail to convict him.
- This also hurts the movie's intended message, as nearly everything that Cobretti says about enforcing the law is valid to some degree, but having him decide to kill a surrendering criminal ends up making it look like he doesn't believe in due process, which would make him hardly any better than the Night Slasher.
- The movie also cops out of any debate on whether Cobretti's actions could be considered legally wrong but morally right (given that the Night Slasher would cause more deaths if he did somehow escape being convicted) by having the double agent reveal herself and attack Cobretti, with both she and the Night Slasher dying in the resulting fight.
Good Qualities
- Cobretti is kind of a cool character, mainly let down by the poor story, and being given both an excessive number of corny jokes and too many speeches about how cops need more freedom to take down criminals their way.
- Some good acting from Sylvester Stallone, Brian Thompson, and Andrew Robinson.
- Some decent and intense action sequences.
- The soundtrack composed by Sylvester Levay is passable. There are also some good songs, like "Angel of the City" by Robert Tepper and "Voice of America's Sons" by John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band.
- The Night Slasher gets a pretty cool death scene when Cobretti impales him on a hook and throws him into a furnace.
- Between the two adaptations of its source novel (the other being 1995's Fair Game), it's easily the better one.
- The Night Slasher is a pretty intimidating and menacing villain.
- While the movie's pro-conservative messages are a little overdone and repetitive, it can still be quite satisfying to see Cobretti beat up Detective Monte (Andrew Robinson) and mock his liberal beliefs in the last scene.
Reception
Cobra was panned by critics and audiences. The film currently holds 14% on Rotten Tomatoes with an average of 2.7 out of 10 and a critic consensus that reads "A disengaged Sylvester Stallone plays the titular Cobra with no bite in this leaden action thriller, queasily fixated on wanton carnage and nothing else." Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune gave the film a two-and-a-half out of four stars and described the film as "a nonstop war between one grenade-and-gun-laden man." Steve Crum of Video-Reviewmaster.com described it as "Sub-par Stallone shoot-em-up." Despite the mostly negative reception of the past, most present-day Stallone and action movie fans now see Cobra as a decent film.
Box Office
Cobra opened up at #1 on its opening weekend with a domestic gross of $12,653,032 and later made a domestic gross of $49 million. In foreign countries, Cobra made $111 million. Overall, the film made a worldwide gross of $160 million against its $25 million budget making it a success.
Awards and nominations
Cobra was nominated for four Golden Raspberry Awards including Worst Picture, but lost to Howard the Duck.
Trivia
- The screenplay was originally conceived from ideas Stallone had during pre-production of 1984's Beverly Hills Cop, whose screenplay he heavily revised. Stallone had wanted to make Beverly Hills Cop a less comedic and more action-oriented film, which the studio rejected as being far too expensive. When he left that project, Eddie Murphy was brought in to play the lead role.
- Despite George P. Costamos being listed as the director of the movie, the title was an honorific at best. Stallone was the one who was really calling all the shots.
- The movie was originally supposed to be released with an X rating and a run-time of 120 minutes. A good 30 minutes worth of footage was cut and a lot of the violence was toned down so that the movie could compete with the then smash hit Top Gun.
Videos
External links
Cobra at the Internet Movie Database
Cobra on Rotten Tomatoes