The Specialist
So when you get
a movie with a title like The Specialist you know it’s going to be in
the same family as movies titled after stoic asskicking professions such as The
Transporter or The Professional (aka Leon: The Professional). All these guys are kinda the same angsty
loners with high-paid dangerous jobs, samurai codes of honour, live in places
with all sorts of boobytraps and wacky emergency escape roots (that inevitably
get used in the film) and cherish some simple relationship with a something
that doesn’t ask any questions such as Leon The Professional’s potted plant,
The Transporter’s Orangina vending machine, and this Specialist guy has a
kitten.
There are also
no surprises in the supporting cast.
They all act the way they do in every movie right off the bat. Eric Roberts plays the same hot-headed
scumbag he always plays. Sharon Stone
plays a sex object with an ulterior motive as always. James Woods plays the same smug white-collar
sleazebag known as ‘The James Woods Character’.
They really
don’t fuck around with you on the characters by trying to fake you out with
something like having Sharon Stone wear glasses and be doctor, but then take
off the glasses and turn out to be secretly hot or something. Eric Roberts is right over the top in coming
across as an asshole in least amount of screen time possible.
James Woods
might throw you off for a second because in the first scene in the movie he’s
wearing a camouflage army jacket, but he’s still acting like the same smug
corrupt smartass he always plays and quickly switches back to wearing his
trademark James Woods white button-up shirt and bland tie combo. In fact, he probably had the white shirt and
tie on under the army jacket. I can’t
believe a guy like James Woods would ever join the army and the idea of him
doing a push-up or getting barked at by a drill sergeant but not sassing back
seems far fetched, but I like trying to imagine it.
But at least
this movie respects your intelligence enough to make James Woods a sleazebag
right off the bat instead of wasting time where he seems like a nice guy then
acting like it’s a twist that James Woods turns out to be scum. There’s none of that Sean Bean Factor where
you know a guy’s a traitor and scumbag and you’re just counting down the
minutes until he’s revealed as such.
The one person
not doing their usual is Stallone, and maybe that’s the problem with this
movie. He’s not blue collar, in fact he
actually wears nice suits in this movie.
And his special skill isn’t even a very Stallonish skill like arm
wrestling or cliff hanging. In this film
he’s a demolition man, but not like the one played in the film Demolition
Man, he seems more like he learned this stuff in some fancy school as
opposed to just knowing how to hang off cliffs from being born on cliff or
knowing how to arm wrestle from being born in the back of a truck or
whatever. He’s also not a victim of
circumstance like your typical Stallone hero, this is a movie where he actually
chooses his level of involvement.
The only
Stallonish things about this movie are that Sharon Stone’s codename is Adrian
and there’s also a juxtaposition of two intercut training montages like in Rocky
4. In Rocky 4 we saw how
Rocky trained in a natural way jogging through the mountains and Ivan Drago
(Dolph Oleg Lundgren) trained in a science lab.
In The Specialist we see two intercut training montages, one of
Stallone in his desolate warehouse home doing the heavy weight lifting
resistance training needed to lift light sticks of dynamite and pocket sized
detonation devices, intercut with another montage of Sharon Stone training her
sexiness skills by posing in front of her mirror and stroking her legs in her
luxurious penthouse across town. But
other than that this film has very little Stallonitude to it.
Stallone plays a sharp-dressed independently-wealthy mopey loner who
wanders the streets of Miami and tries to reach out to people by occasionally
taking well-paying contracts to blow them up. He struts around in nice suits and drives a
posh car but seems sad and sickened looking at how people on the streets treat
each other, so if you ever wanted to know how Don Johnson would’ve played
Travis Bickle, this film is your answer.
He used to blow people up for the army but like a lot of these The
Professional guys he had a samurai code about not killing women or children
and James Woods tricked him into breaking that code so he went into the private
sector.
It seems he
didn’t just want to go into some other line of work that uses explosives but
doesn’t involve killing people such as construction or mining, so these days
he’s just really selective about his hits.
He uses these things called BBSes, which were crude predecessors to the
internet that you’re reading now, and he scans matchmaking networks for
codewords like ‘lonely’ which he interprets to mean ‘I’ve got
somebody I’m going to pay you millions of dollars to blow up’ and is
surprisingly usually right. I’d figure
he’d just end up blowing up lots of lonely people, but he at least gets good
and explicit about the assassination deal before acting.
Like I said,
this is kinda where the problem of this film lies. The hero isn’t forced into the action
situation, nor is he even professionally obligated like Cobra, and he’s one of
these types of action heroes that lets a situation keep getting worse for too
long before acting. Stallone does a good
job seeming melancholy and he actually looks really good in a suit. Most bodybuilder types don’t dress up well
and end up just looking like bodyguards or something but Stallone pulls it
off. But I don’t think this is how we
want to see Stallone, so the entertainment has to come from the other players,
and luckily it does.
The scenes of
Eric Roberts out on dates with Sharon Stone are pretty hilarious. On every date he runs off to beat up somebody
who was just passing. And his dialogue
actually seems like it was written by Eric Roberts, which is sort of a
compliment and an insult to Eric Roberts as well as a roundhouse kick and
menacing squint in the general direction of good filmmaking.
But it’s James
Woods who really sells this thing. He
reaches Nicholas Cage levels of overacting complete with bug-eyed arm waving,
manic shouting and head shaking. Woods
chews up every scene he’s in. Near the
end of the picture he’s leading a SWAT team assault on Stallone’s boobytrapped
warehouse home and just grabs a megaphone and starts staggering around amidst
explosions and gunfire basically doing his own little standup comedy routine
seemingly oblivious to his surroundings.
There’s a
really funny part at the police station where they’re trying to trace a phone
call from Stallone and so Woods has to keep Stallone on the line while the
whole police squad listens to Stallone berate him and reveal his shady past and
Woods makes every exaggerated face possible to express agony and embarassment.
But
the funniest scene in this film is definitely the sex scene. Normally in Hollywood when a male lead is shorter
than the female lead they shoot the scene from the waist up and get the male
lead to stand on a box or something. In
this movie they don’t bother, or maybe Tom Cruise was using the lift box that
day and they had to film that scene so they went without it. But maybe they should’ve filmed it with them
sitting down or something. The result is
pretty funny looking seeing Stallone standing up and snogging Stone while she
dwarfs him.
We get one of
the last of those really explicit sex scenes that were obligatory in 80s action
movies and vanished in the late 90s followed by an even funnier scene in the
shower. Normally when couples snuggle in
the shower they wash each other in an affectionate but ineffective way, but
Stone looks like she’s really trying to scrub clean Stallone. She keeps going for the same spot on his arm
like there’s some grease she really wants to get out. And again, the height difference adds to the
humour of this scene.
As for the
action, well, this movie is pretty slow-paced. Stallone’s specialty is explosives, so most of
the sequences just involve Stallone putting a bomb somewhere and then somebody
walking into it and getting blow up. The
part where Stallone kills Eric Roberts he hides a bomb in a demitasse of tea
and has the remote detonator in his tennis racket. I never thought I’d see Stallone hold a
tennis racket or Eric Roberts sipping from a demitasse so I guess I can count
that as something new, but there just isn’t enough back-and-forth to the action
for me. The only real fight scene is one
where Stallone beats up a bunch of thugs for hogging bus seats. I guess blowing up the bus would’ve been an
over-reaction, but that scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest
of the movie which is probably why I like it.
But I definitely could’ve used more of this type of thing.
Overall, this
is a pretty weak feature. It’s
definitely in a transition phase between those old lowbrow action films of
Steven Seagal (who was offered the lead role in this) and these newschool
highbrow action movies like The Bourne Identity. You’ve got one of those newschool type heroes
who deal with remorse and accountability and use hair products, but he’s played
by oldschooler Stallone. You’ve got more
plot than action movies used to have, but only just enough to frustrate a
stupid person and not really enough to excite person of regular
intelligence. Instead of asskicking
action you’ve got more highbrow suspense stuff, but then you’ve also got Eric
Roberts. So the movie is definitely lost
between eras, but there’s still some entertainment value here, mostly from
James Woods. But I would’ve preferred a
film with more scenes like the one on the bus.
And I guess a
lot of people were offended by Rod Stieger’s crude Hispanic accent in the film Duck
You Sucker and wished his character had died at the end of that film, so
they bring him back for this movie and get him to do the same accent then kill
him. So in a way this film is some sort
of triumph for the Latino community, and I guess that counts for something too.
If you liked this, here are some other
recommended articles:
Rambo 4: The Stallone
Renaissance Part Two
Some throats were made to
be slit.
Let’s reminisce about Tony Scott’s greatest film, shall we?
Successful trilogizing
complete!