Cobra

A one man army who bucks any and all authority, abominable one liners, montages set to power ballads and a positively reaganesque approach to crime and punishment? Why yes, it's an '80s action movie, starring none other than 'Sly' Stallone himself.

What's brilliant about this particular example, and by brilliant I mean dreadful is that it's unashamedly a political statement. It is quite literally an argument for the death penalty. Several characters go some way out of their way to explain that the only way to stop murders crawling through your window at night is to start lethally injecting some dudes. Or better yet, let the police just gun the suckers down and save on the trial fees.

It is pretty much, and rather ironically Judge Dredd without the irony. Cobra is the law. He carries a gun that is decidedly not standard issue and his superiors aren't mad keen on the way he keeps killing suspects, but what do they know, right? They're just pen pushing desk jockeys and deserve a swift sucker punch, which isn't grounds for dismissal or assault charges or anything.

It really is a movie built upon a single idea about the virtues of harsher law enforcement with random clumps of action movie paraphernalia nailed to it. There's a forgettable car chase and a forgettable shoot out and I think there's a confrontation with the bad guy at some point but I forget. There are flailing attempts at characterisation that probably leaked in from some other films and the chemistry between it's leading man and lady (who fall for one another on the basis that the film needs romance) can only be described as clumsy and awkward, which is funnier when you consider they were married at the time, but then I suppose if you're going to cast the person who happens to be standing closest to you at the time you can't expect miracles. Or acting.

I'm confused by many of it's elements. There are a group of guys at the beginning who are banging axes together, but this is never really elaborated upon. I assume they were the killers gang, but what was the whole gang thing about anyhow? Also, their brilliant plan to avoid being identified by a witness was to confront the police directly. In front of a large numbers of witnesses. Presumably as Judge Cobra took the attractive model out to the sticks to protect the crap out of her, all the people who saw some gigantic crazy looking guy running about a hospital with a knife were being protected by less sociopathic police officers.

It is not, as you might have gathered, one of Stallone's major works, but I think it's fairly representative of the vast majority of eighties action films. In that it's really, really awful.