The Specialist (1994) Warner Bros./Action RT: 109 minutes Rated R (language, strong violence, nudity, sexual content) Director: Luis Llosa Screenplay: Alexandra Seros Music: John Barry Cinematography: Jeffrey L. Kimball Release date: October 7, 1994 (US) Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, James Woods, Eric Roberts, Rod Steiger, Mario Ernesto Sanchez. Box Office: $57.3M (US)/$170.3M (World)
Rating: ***
In order to enjoy a movie like The Specialist, you have to lower your standards and go along for the ride, bumpy though it may be. It’s a bad movie filled with clichés, plot holes, shameless overacting and dopey dialogue. It also has lots of explosions! Whenever it threatens to become dull, director Luis Llosa (Sniper) has our hero blow something else up. And he doesn’t just blow it up, he blows it up real good (to borrow the catchphrase from SCTV’s Farm Film Report).
Pretty much like any action movie with Sylvester Stallone, The Specialist is colossally dumb. Llosa tries to make it a bit noir-ish with its not-so-upstanding protagonist and the femme fatale–like woman that draws him into a revenge plot. I should be embarrassed to admit I like this silly movie, but I’m not. It’s kind of fun in its own way. We already know Stallone’s acting ability is limited at best. He lumbers around and grunts virtually all of his lines. I don’t think that’s what Llosa was going for here, but that’s what he got. His attempt at transcending the action genre is clumsy at best, but it’s not what I’d consider a failure. It’s not quite a success either.
Our story begins in Bogota, Columbia circa 1984 where we find CIA operatives Ray Quick (Stallone) and Ned Trent (Woods, Against All Odds) planning to take out a drug lord with a bomb planted on a bridge. Ray is an explosives expert who knows how to rig a bomb so that it kills only the intended target, no collateral damage. Ned is a complete psychopath who doesn’t care who gets killed as long as somebody gets killed. The two men come to blows after Ray tries to defuse the explosive upon spotting a little girl riding in the car with the intended target. He fails and KABOOM! Because of this, he walks away from the CIA and takes his ex-partner down with him.
Ten years later, we find Ray working as a freelance hitman out of Miami. Potential clients contact him on an Internet bulletin board. He accepts only the assignments that interest him. A woman named May Munro (Stone, Basic Instinct) wants to hire him to kill the Cuban gangsters that murdered her parents when she was a child. She witnessed the whole thing from her bedroom closet and knows exactly who she wants dead. One of the three murderers is Tomas Leon (Roberts, Star 80), the son of crime boss Joe Leon (Steiger, In the Heat of the Night).
Ray refuses the assignment so May takes matters into her own hands. She infiltrates the organization by getting “close” to Tomas. Ray, who’s intrigued by the woman, follows her and doesn’t like what he sees. He finally agrees to do the job. Now for a wild but not unexpected coincidence. His old adversary Ned now works for the Leons as their head of security. As such, it’s his job to find out who’s been blowing up members of the organization. It doesn’t take him long to zero in on Ray. Taking him down will be the greater challenge.
Where to start, where to start, that is the question. As The Specialist progresses, it makes less and less sense. Some things defy all logic, not that logic ever factors into a Stallone actioner. Joe Leon has enough pull with the local police to make them assign Ned to the bomb squad as an expert. I guess it doesn’t matter that he was fired from the CIA or why. And you’d think somebody would notice the man is insane and shouldn’t be working around explosives. He gets loonier and loonier, yet remains part of the investigative team. However, it’s also one of the movie’s strong points.
Woods devours the scenery playing a role he knows very well. He’s at his absolute best playing unhinged characters. He’s definitely the life of this party. Roberts and Steiger don’t fare as well. In another one of the movie’s many plot holes, Roberts’ character looks exactly the same age as when he killed May’s parents some twenty years earlier. And what’s up with Steiger’s bad Cuban accent? He makes Al Pacino in Scarface sound like a native speaker. It’s thick to the point of comic exaggeration. And boy does he overact in several scenes. It’s actually quite funny. I haven’t seen anything like it since Laurence Olivier’s overemoting in The Jazz Singer.
It’s always a risk putting together two major stars as there might not be any chemistry between them. Such is the case with Sly and Sharon. When they finally have a scene together (more than an hour into it), there’s nothing there. It look and sounds forced. And that sex scene in the shower. It doesn’t just border on parody, it’s outright hysterical. I think Llosa might have been going for erotic, but it didn’t quite work out that way. On the upside, Stone looks great in the sexy outfits that show off her legs. On the downside, I didn’t really believe her performance as a traumatized adult driven to revenge.
So what exactly does The Specialist have in its favor? How about some really awesome action scenes? Before I get to the explosions, there’s this one scene that I just love. On a bus, Ray tries to offer his seat to a pregnant woman only to have a young punk swipe it. He refuses to move so Ray beats the living daylights out of him and his pals. For good measure, he sends the rude seat thief flying through the window with a well-placed karate kick. As one who frequents public transportation, this is something I’d like to see happen in real life. In the words of Beavis and Butthead, that was COOL! The explosions are also cool, especially the one that causes a hotel room to break off the building and fall into the ocean. Yeah, the special effects look dated now, but they’re still awesome.
None of The Specialist is even remotely believable (no duh!), but isn’t that the point of action movies? Fans come to see the hero take down scores of bad guys in violent fashion. In this case, Sly’s character blows them to kingdom come. That’s fine by me. God only knows how he manages to set up the explosions unnoticed, but he does. This makes the whole thing worthwhile. As I said, it’s a bad movie, but one that happens to be entertaining albeit sometimes for the wrong reasons. This is a true guilty pleasure. It’s best to just shut off your brain and let it happen. You just might enjoy it. I know I did.
