{"id":2482,"date":"2024-08-18T05:20:34","date_gmt":"2024-08-18T05:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=2482"},"modified":"2024-08-18T21:10:08","modified_gmt":"2024-08-18T21:10:08","slug":"the-specialist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/08\/18\/the-specialist\/","title":{"rendered":"The Specialist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Specialist <\/strong>(1994)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Warner Bros.\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 109 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (language, strong violence, nudity, sexual content)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Luis Llosa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Alexandra Seros\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: John Barry\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Jeffrey L. Kimball\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: October 7, 1994 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, James Woods, Eric Roberts, Rod Steiger, Mario Ernesto Sanchez.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $57.3M (US)\/$170.3M (World)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ***<\/p>\n

\u00a0In order to enjoy a movie like The Specialist<\/strong>, you have to lower your standards and go along for the ride, bumpy though it may be. It\u2019s a bad movie filled with clich\u00e9s, 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\u2019t just blow it up, he blows it up real good (to borrow the catchphrase from SCTV\u2019s Farm Film Report).<\/p>\n

\u00a0Pretty much like any action movie with Sylvester Stallone, The Specialist<\/strong> is colossally dumb. Llosa tries to make it a bit noir<\/em>-ish with its not-so-upstanding protagonist and the femme fatale–<\/strong><\/em>like woman that draws him into a revenge plot. I should be embarrassed to admit I like this silly movie, but I\u2019m not. It\u2019s kind of fun in its own way. We already know Stallone\u2019s acting ability is limited at best. He lumbers around and grunts virtually all of his lines. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s what Llosa was going for here, but that\u2019s what he got. His attempt at transcending the action genre is clumsy at best, but it\u2019s not what I\u2019d consider a failure. It\u2019s not quite a success either.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Our 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Ten 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).<\/p>\n

\u00a0Ray refuses the assignment so May takes matters into her own hands. She infiltrates the organization by getting \u201cclose\u201d to Tomas. \u00a0Ray, who\u2019s intrigued by the woman, follows her and doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s his job to find out who\u2019s been blowing up members of the organization. It doesn\u2019t take him long to zero in on Ray. Taking him down will be the greater challenge.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Where to start, where to start, that is the question. As The Specialist<\/strong> 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\u2019t matter that he was fired from the CIA or why. And you\u2019d think somebody would notice the man is insane and shouldn\u2019t be working around explosives. He gets loonier and loonier, yet remains part of the investigative team. However, it\u2019s also one of the movie\u2019s strong points.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Woods devours the scenery playing a role he knows very well. He\u2019s at his absolute best playing unhinged characters. He\u2019s definitely the life of this party. Roberts and Steiger don\u2019t fare as well. In another one of the movie\u2019s many plot holes, Roberts\u2019 character looks exactly the same age as when he killed May\u2019s parents some twenty years earlier. And what\u2019s up with Steiger\u2019s bad Cuban accent? He makes Al Pacino in Scarface sound like a native speaker. It\u2019s thick to the point of comic exaggeration. And boy does he overact in several scenes. It\u2019s actually quite funny. I haven\u2019t seen anything like it since Laurence Olivier\u2019s overemoting in The Jazz Singer.<\/p>\n

\u00a0It\u2019s 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\u2019s nothing there. It look and sounds forced. And that sex scene in the shower. It doesn\u2019t just border on parody, it\u2019s outright hysterical. I think Llosa might have been going for erotic, but it didn\u2019t 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\u2019t really believe her performance as a traumatized adult driven to revenge.<\/p>\n

\u00a0So what exactly does The Specialist<\/strong> have in its favor? How about some really awesome action scenes? Before I get to the explosions, there\u2019s 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\u2019d 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\u2019re still awesome.<\/p>\n

\u00a0None of The Specialist<\/strong> is even remotely believable (no duh!), but isn\u2019t 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\u2019s character blows them to kingdom come. That\u2019s 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\u2019s a bad movie, but one that happens to be entertaining albeit sometimes for the wrong reasons. This is a true guilty pleasure. It\u2019s best to just shut off your brain and let it happen. You just might enjoy it. I know I did.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Specialist (1994)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Warner Bros.\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 109 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (language, strong violence, nudity, sexual content)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Luis Llosa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Alexandra Seros\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: John Barry\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Jeffrey L. Kimball\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: October 7, 1994 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, James Woods, Eric Roberts, Rod Steiger, Mario Ernesto Sanchez.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $57.3M (US)\/$170.3M (World) Rating: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2511,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guilty-pleasures"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/The-Specialist-PIC.png?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2482"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2514,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482\/revisions\/2514"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}