Cinecult: COBRA

Originally run on 2 March 2009. Image via Google.

Cinema is a wonderful thing. There’s such an incredible array of meaningful and exquisite films to watch. There’s the body of work of Akira Kurosawa and American titans like Orson Wells or Martin Scorsese and then there’s my favorite living directors, the Coen Brothers. And even though I like to play the cynic, I know that as many terrible fat-suit comedies or Michael Bay movies come out, I can always fall back on the past and draw a new experience from a great film by a great director. Cobra is not one of these films.

Cobra began as a failed pitch for Beverly Hills Cop and it only takes about thirty seconds of watching the film to figure out why a studio would pass on it. It’s an incoherent, hyper-macho mess of a movie. The world of Cobra is one where no two lines of dialogue ever relate to the other and where good police work means machine-gunning bikers from a truck.

What keeps Cobra from being just another campy action film is that it was very clearly the product of a lot of thought, effort and money. Despite this professional, sincere effort what results is a low-rent, madcap version of To Live In Die in LA. This might sound like a reason to not see the film, and it sort of is. While it’s true that Cobra won’t teach you about the human condition or the terrors of the modern world, it also won’t bore you. It’s a psychotically perfect action movie and there isn’t a single minute of it that isn’t a wonder to behold.

The film stars Sylvester Stallone (Rhinetone, Over the Top), who also penned the movie, as Detective Marion “Cobra” Cobretti who isn’t so much a character as a collection of tough guy clichés packed into a single Mary Sue and has no personality beyond his love for shooting scumbags. Opposite the Cobra is the “Nightslasher,” the world’s most unimaginatively named serial killer, who is played by Brian Thompson, better known as “The Scary Guy From the X-Files” and “The One Scary Punk That Terminator Kills (That Isn’t Bill Paxton).” If I follow the plot correctly the Nightslasher is some kind of an axe murderer, cultist, biker, terrorist person—maybe. The script never makes it clear just what the bad guys are about other than a few rambling speeches that sound like they were cribbed from Charles Manson’s grocery list. Brigette Nielson plays Ingrid, a model who witnesses a murder (in the middle of the street, no less). Action ensues as Cobra protects her from the Nightslasher’s army of Mötorhead aficionados.

From there on the narrative jumps from one ridiculous action scene to the next with no real story other than a few scenes where a nebbish bureaucrat who harangues Cobra about “law” and “order” and “fair trials” (boooooooring) and where Cobra proclaims his theories about the Nightslasher that seem to come out of a completely different movie. What makes this senseless garbage worth watching is when Cobra espouses his beliefs about cops having to circumvent the law in order to protect it or when he lists off meaningless statistics about crime in America, we’re actually supposed to sympathize with him. The film’s philosophy is the only thing crazier than Cobra’s ability to hit a criminal with every single bullet he fires.

Cobra is the perfect example of style outstripping substance and what an unrestrained ego with too much money looks like. Sure, you could watch The Seventh Seal or 4 Months, 3 Weeks or 2 Days, and you’d probably leave the experience a little wiser, but then again, sometimes you need a man like Stallone to come by and remind you just how spectacular cinema can be.