Originally published: June 14, 1986
In Cobra, Sylvester Stallone stoops to a new, silly low.
It was bad enough having a semi-coherent Rambo roaming the screens, but now we’ve got Marlon Cobretti, a.k.a. “Cobra,” who speaks even less and when he does it’s just stupid
Example: In the first sequence of the film, Cobra confronts a crazed gunman who threatens to blow up a supermarket, along with its shoppers. Cobra responds, “Go ahead. I don’t shop here,” in his best deadpan, growling voice. Then rumbles, “You’re a disease, and I’m the cure.”
Fine.
If that’s not enough. Cobra’s out to wipe off the map a legion of axe-clanking slashers who want to create their own society. Conveniently, Cobra’s police bosses won’t believe the legion exists, and Cobra doesn’t have the smarts to prove it exists without slaughtering the whole gang and destroying a large part of a small town in doing so.
It’s comic-book moviemaking carried to the extreme. So far, in fact, that it’s just plain stupid.
Example: As Cobra carries eye-witness Ingrid (Stallone’s wife Brigitte Nielsen) to a safe house, magnum-wielding thugs in two other vehicles pounce on them. During the obligatory chase, Cobra drives his vintage ’50s Mercury off the second floor of a parking garage, performs a “Bat-turn” on a freeway, and while driving backwards blows up a pickup truck with his machine gun, then executes numerous jumps, and manages to survive driving headlong into a construction vehicle.
All the while, the audience is laughing, not because it’s a comedy, but because Cobra is ridiculously stupid.
There’s a disease ravaging the movie screens; and Cobra isn’t the cure, he’s the head germ.
Commentary Track: I see in the Wikipedia entry that Cobra is considered a cult classic. Is that because it’s so laughably bad?