Wednesday 30 January 2019

SNAKE BITE



































Cobra is a film made at the beginning of the end of Sylvester Stallone’s period of pomp, and its production was apparently impacted by the star’s arrogance, bad behaviour and insistence on creative control, despite not being particularly interested in the project. It has a slightly odd premise and a strange structure but runs on kinetic energy, only really hampered by Stallone’s character, a taciturn, hyper violent, seemingly superhuman cop who does what it takes to take scumbags down. His real name is Marion Cobretti, but everyone calls him Cobra, which is why he has a picture of a snake on the handle of his gun. The registration plate on his appropriately squat muscle car reads Awsum 50.

Cobra, who has built up shoes and an unlit match permanently pushed into the side of his muscly mouth, is a member of the elite LAPD Zombie Squad, and is going about his business curing the disease of crime (he’s an old fashioned sawbones rather than a keyhole surgeon) when he learns that there is a serial killer on the loose, a maniac dubbed The Night Slasher who has already viciously murdered fifteen people. In actual fact, The maniac is a group of maniacs, The New World, a cult who believe in the survival of the fittest and are working steadily to thin out the weaker members of society. When they meet, they do so in a moodily lit warehouse, and they bang axes and shovels together like a Radio Gaga video set in B and Q. Cobra wants in on the case, and he gets his wish, although he is warned that he needs to follow the rules. He says he will, but we all know he’s lying.

Things escalate when a model called Ingrid Knudsen (played by Stallone’s then wife, Brigitte Nielsen) is a witness to a cult murder and becomes a target for the group. Cobra tries to move her to safety (with his lips and groin) but is thwarted by an inside woman, a traitor within the force. This betrayal culminates in an all-out assault by a hundred or so New World members, armed to the teeth and riding motorbikes. Stallone kills ninety nine of them: by gun, by grenade, by setting alight, by snapping their necks like twigs, by kicking them in the back. So much for the master race, it’s a bloodbath. Eventually, with no-one left to kill, he goes mano e mano with the head villain, popping him onto a convenient passing metal hook (they’re in a completely deserted but fully working steelworks) and watching as he is carried screaming into the flames of the foundry. Job done, Cobra just has time to punch his superior officer before disappearing on a stolen chopper with Ingrid into the sunset to a soundtrack of arid AOR.   

Cobra was directed by George P. Cosmatos (father of Panos, the best director in the world right now). He had previously worked with Stallone on the hugely successful Rambo II, but their reunion was less than harmonious (although still enormously profitable). Working with a writer, director and actor who is probably the biggest star in the world can be difficult, especially when that person is a monster high on a run of megahits that cast him as a superman. It’s rumoured that Stallone may have directed the film, but I’d dispute this. Cosmatos is not an auteur (or wasn’t given the chance to be), but he has a style (he likes sunsets, helicopters, close ups of weaponry and lots of cuts) and, although Cobra is quick and dirty, it has his signature upon it, albeit in pencil. The abiding emotion gained from the film is of mild embarrassment at Stallone’s showboating, and the feeling of ninety minutes sacrificed on the altar of an all-consuming ego.  

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