Stop the presses because I just had the privilege of seeing Cobra, the greatest movie ever made. What can I say? It's a two hour merry-go-round of vintage asskicking in which you really can't tell where the bumcrushing stops and everything else begins. It's almost like someone asked me to bed three hot naked lesbians simultaneously with a side of honey barbeque wings, a lager, and a nearby boombox set to Astrud Gilberto's Girl from Ipanema; I agreed; and I only had to give two hours of my non-sexual time in return (meaning 1/12th of the pie graph). Unfortunately, I find myself doing the thirty billionth-to-next best thing, oggling a remotely kinda sorta hot Brigitte Nielsen — meaning when she didn't look like a dude — which invariably places this in about the mid-to-late 80's, a bygone era when directors and producers never went wrong with action clichés, cheesy catchphrases, and Sylvester Stallone in lead roles. Of course, it goes by implication that a film with all three has to be good, which Cobra effectively is. Damn good.The Protagonist(s)
Stallone plays Marion "Cobra" Cobretti, a laconic and gritty undercover detective who uses extremely violent and lawfully reckless measures (ie. The way God intended) to bring criminals to justice. Imagine that you just crashed into Vin Diesel's truck while parallel parking. Good, now imagine that you did it deliberately, except that he's driving a low rider, not Vin Diesel, and three Mexican guys. Yep, Marion Cobretti does just that, and he has enough audacity left over to remove a cigarette from one guy's mouth and lecture him on the fine rules of public parking etiquette thereafter. Cobretti doesn't waste any time in fulfilling one of his implicit duties as a community organizer. (I'll be damned if I know what that is, but it probably involves kicking ass and taking names. . . if only verbally.)
The Antagonists
The Antagonists
Behold. . . the face of pure evil!
Not much is known about the antagonists, and quite frankly, there doesn't need to be. The discrepant banging of axes and the subtle usage of quasi-dance club lighting tells you that these ruffians are purely malevolent, all serious business, and zero percent auditorily adroit. The movie doesn't waste three hours explaining their morally equivalent back stories and having you shed tears over their abject socioeconomic conditions (they live in a sewer) or how they got their disfiguring scars through frequent parental abuse (heavy metal and alcohol explains a lot of things). They're simply a heavily-armed group of ignominious new world cultists who love robbing supermarkets, going on random killing sprees, and clanking axes together. Need I say more?
The Beginning
The movie introduces Cobretti as he races to the scene of an escalating hostage situation at (sigh) a supermarket, and things obviously aren't going well. There, a shotgun-wielding homocidal maniac, one who's not content enough to grab a bludgeoning weapon and jam, doles out painful samples of hot lead with deadly results, sparing neither innocuous beer cans nor virgin fresh produce in his violent protest against the deterioration of family-based Mom and Pop corner stores. . . or something, but organized commerce needn't fear for long! The everpresent defender of chain groceries and the bane of small business advocates arrives, but not in time to save a helpless young man from getting double buckshot to the thorax. Oh! Rejected!
The Showdown
Every film has a definitive, signature moment. The Godfather has the baptism scene, Heat has the bank shootout, and Braveheart that one part where an English guy gets stabbed in the face. Cobra has about a billion of these scenes, but none more poignant and representative of its disconcerting tone than Cobretti's harrowing face to face encounter with the aforementioned suspect after being shot at for a few minutes. Is his immediate nemesis a misguided crusader? An advocate for a bygone cause? Who cares? Either way, someone dies and the entire scene once again proves that no genuine 80's action flick would be complete without gratuitous violence and witty, memorable one-liners. Enjoy!
Now that's what I call a cold cut with the trimmings. Ho, ho, ho!
And Everything Else
The next hundred and ten minutes brilliantly keep pace with the first ten as the aforesaid cult led by its enigmatic leader, the Night Slasher, brings Los Angeles to its knees with another chain of loosely-connected murders, to which Brigitte Nielsen, whose depiction of a glorified and apparently emotionally devoid model is a somewhat fair imitation of life (unless she were really being hunted, at which point she'd be Rebecca Schaeffer and just as dead), becomes an unwilling witness and an eventual target herself. She later hooks up with Stallone and his wise-cracking cop buddy (Reni Santoni), eloping with the former into the countryside until the cult finds out and all hell breaks loose in a climactic and awesomely pointless (and pointlessly awesome) automobile chase through the wine country. Yes, and you needn't ask if bullets and limbs start flying. It should be pretty obvious by now.
Fin
Cobra was released when unmistakably violent films advocating harsher penalties for crimes — the Death Wish and Dirty Harry franchises — were a dime a dozen and nevertheless downright awesome in every sense of the word. Any movie afiocionado will acknowledge the greatness of this mid 80's classic, in which Stallone takes asskicking, kicking ass, and everything in between to an entirely new level in one of the finest action films in a golden age for fine action films. I, being the other arbiter of said activity, don't deal with any afiocionados who don't. . .
