THE SPECIALIST
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, James Woods, Eric Roberts, Rod Steiger. Screenplay: Alexandra Seros. Director: Luis Llosa.
There are moments in this job when one is faced with separating the "so-bad-it's-entertaining" from the "just-plain-awful." At those times, I wish I could become Joe Bob Briggs, and make the recommendation to "check it out" based simply on explosions, naked breasts and Cuban gangster-fu. But THE SPECIALIST doesn't deserve such consideration. Ponderous, pretentious and acted with astounding indifference, THE SPECIALIST is a big fat bore with a couple of nice explosions. It's too somber to work as camp, and too tedious to work as anything else.
Sylvester Stallone stars as Ray Quick, a former CIA demolitions expert now haunted by his past and hiring out his skills with explosives freelance. He is contacted by May Munro (Sharon Stone), a woman obsessed with the murder of her parents at the hands of three thugs led by Tomas (Eric Roberts), the son of a Miami drug lord (Rod Steiger). Ray is unsure whether he wants to take the job, until he becomes a bit too personally interested in May's attempts to get closer to Tomas. He also discovers that the drug lord's head of security is Ned Trent (James Woods), Ray's former CIA partner. Trent carries a ten-year grudge for Ray's part in having him thrown out of the Agency, and plans to use May's vendetta to exact a little vengeance of his own.
Much as one might expect, THE SPECIALIST is being hyped on the pairing of box-office heavyweights Stallone and Stone. Unfortunately, both of them spend most of the film looking as though they've just done a NyQuil highball. Stone swaggers through discos in slow motion, wanders through her inexplicably massive house in slow motion, has sex in slow motion. At some point, director Luis Llosa needed to explain to Stone that "haunted" and "bored" are entirely different emotions. Stallone is even more comatose, conveying Ray's deep reservoir of anguish and guilt through drooping eyelids and jaw muscle isometrics, as well as speaking in what can only be described as an impersonation of Henry Kissinger with a head cold. Perhaps that was one of the reasons behind a scene in which Stallone dispatches a group of young hoods on a bus, which was added after test screenings: they needed at least some evidence that he had a pulse.
The rest of the cast is nearly as bad. James Woods tries to cut loose as the demented Trent, but he never makes for a particularly threatening villain. He's better when humiliating a bomb squad commander or making off-handed insults about a loud shirt. Eric Roberts, typecast for most of his career as a lout-mouthed sleazeball, plays...well, a slightly more sedate sleazeball, delivering lines like "What I want, I take" straight out of the Introduction to Basic Machismo Handbook. And Rod Steiger, who was given to overacting even in his Academy Award-winning heyday, is appalling as the Cuban Godfather, doing an accent which rivals Kevin Costner's Robin Hood as the worst in recent memory.
There are a couple of moments in THE SPECIALIST which are worth unintentional giggles. One is the ill-advised scene in which Stallone and Stone stand together in a hotel room, undressing each other while Stone stares down at the top of the 5'8" Stallone's head. Another is trying to understand how Stone's May, who looks about ten years older than Roberts' Tomas, was supposed to be a young girl when an adult Roberts helped kill May's parents. But THE SPECIALIST is simply brain-dead from top to bottom. There are almost too many examples of stupidity to single one out, but my personal favorite involves May faking her own death by tossing her wallet in with a 60-year-old corpse. Apparently they don't have photos on ID in Florida.
I have to hand the pyrotechnics team credit for blowing up a hotel suite; it's a fairly impressive piece of work. But that's when I should have left. Come to think of it, I wish that's where I'd come in, too.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 specialists: 1.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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