Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992) Universal/Action-Comedy RT: 87 minutes Rated PG-13 (some language and violence) Director: Roger Spottiswoode Screenplay: Blake Snyder, William Osborne and William Davies Music: Alan Silvestri Cinematography: Frank Tidy Release date: February 21, 1992 (US) Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Estelle Getty, Jobeth Williams, Roger Rees, Martin Ferrero, Gailard Sartain, John Wesley, Al Fann, Ella Joyce, J. Kenneth Campbell, Nicholas Sadler, Dennis Burkley, Ving Rhames. Box Office: $28.4M (US)/$70.6M (World)
Rating: *
More like Stop! Or I’m Going to Scream in Pain.
The wretched action-comedy Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot is proof positive that Sylvester Stallone should NEVER make another comedy for as long as he lives. He’s not naturally funny, worse when he tries too hard and even worse when he gives up altogether as he seems to have done here based on his lazy, disheartened performance as an L.A. cop with a mother from Hell. It’s just one of many things wrong with Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, a spectacularly unfunny and extremely idiotic excuse for a motion picture that begs you to laugh at it while providing only a flimsy premise and a meager outline of a plot. It has something to do with stolen guns, insurance fraud and a generic villain, a weaselly businessman named Parnell (Rees, Cheers). It’s really all you need to know because its mind is someplace else.
Stallone plays Joe Bomowski, a tough cop with one big Achilles heel, his mother Tutti (Getty, The Golden Girls). She’s coming from Newark, NJ to visit and he is not looking forward to it. After several unsuccessful attempts to reach her on the phone to stop her, he glumly picks her up at the airport only to find that EVERYBODY on the plane knows about his childhood bed-wetting problem. Mom loves to talk about her “little Joey”. She then proceeds to make his life miserable with her domineering nature. She humiliates him while he’s trying to talk a potential suicide off the ledge of a building. She interferes with his romantic relationship with his boss Gwen (Williams, Poltergeist). She carries around photo albums to show perfect strangers. Basically, she drives him nuts.
I suppose you could call Tutti washing out her son’s gun with bleach the catalyst. She tries to buy him a new one from a couple of illegal gun sellers only to witness one of them being murdered in a drive-by. The only cop she’ll talk to is her son and he’s not assigned to the case. Long story short, her meddlesome ways help Joe crack the case.
The only time Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot isn’t completely lifeless is when Getty’s on-screen. She has what the rest of the movie lacks, pep. She also has what her co-star lacks, comic ability. Tutti isn’t the worst movie mother in the world; that would probably be Anne Ramsey in Throw Momma from the Train. However, she is a royal pain in the derriere with the way she follows Joe around while he’s working the case offering unwanted advice and giving unwanted help where necessary. She has a decent scene or two, an amusing line here and there, but it’s not enough to save this sunken ship of a comedy.
I like Stallone. He’s great in action movies like Rambo, Cobra and Tango & Cash. One of my many guilty pleasures is Rhinestone, the country music comedy he made with Dolly Parton. It’s funny for all the wrong reasons. Watching him try to sing a country song alone is worth the price of admission. I also like the John Landis-directed period gangster farce Oscar but Sly gets a lot of help from a great supporting cast that includes Tim Curry, Peter Riegert, Marisa Tomei and Kirk Douglas.
He gets no such help in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, not that there’s any saving his performance to begin with. He’s horribly miscast as a milquetoast still bound to his mother by apron strings that span the entire country. Most of the time, he looks embarrassed and well he should be. There’s no excuse for the scene of him wearing a diaper (DON’T ask!). Scenes like this are a sign of desperation on the part of the filmmakers, director Roger Spottiswoode (Turner & Hooch) in particular. His clear lack of comic ability renders him incapable of making the same genre leap as friend and business partner Arnold Schwarzenegger, very funny in Twins and Kindergarten Cop. It would appear he realizes his folly in agreeing to take this role based on his aloofness.
I can’t blame the failure of Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot entirely on Sly. It would have failed regardless of who starred because the movie itself sucks. It’s not funny and never is. It’s clunkily directed with scene after scene landing with a dull thud. It’s underwritten (by three writers) to the point of total indifference. It not only fails to provide a compelling crime plot, it gives us a bad guy who’s not even remotely interesting. He’s barely even a presence. The love story between Stallone and Williams is similarly uninteresting. You know they’ll resolve all their problems by movie’s end…. with a little help from Mom, of course.
A lot of Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot feels forced like the pairing of Stallone and Getty. It doesn’t work. In fact, NOTHING works in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. It is a broken vehicle of a movie. It has the grace of a garbage truck with a busted axle. There’s not a shred of humor, wit or intelligence to be found in its entirely too long 87 minutes. It’s a waste of time, talent, space and the film it’s printed on. It’s a dud that fires only blanks.
