THE SPECIALIST
or, How I Couldn't Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
A film review by N'Gai Croal
Copyright 1994 N'Gai Croal/Terrordome Bookworks
In his heyday, Alfred Hitchcock always searched for the flesh-and-blood incarnation of the perfect blonde ice queen: first Tippi Hedrin, then Kim Novak and finally Janet Leigh, shaping and molding them into approximations of his fantasy. The tough-as-nails exteriors of Hitchcock's blondes were simply a front; inside, they were all vulnerable little girls waiting to curl up next to the right man. But as twisted as the master of suspense's mind was, he would never have dreamed up Sharon Stone, who couldn't play vulnerable if her life depended on it. Everything about her screen persona is carefully calculated, but not with the classically trained intelligence of a Jodie Foster or the street smart cunning of a Juliette Lewis. Rather, Stone radiates the bitchy confidence of someone who's taking a difficult exam but managed to get hold of the answers in advance. Coupled with a model's face and a pinup's body, it's no wonder Hollywood is falling all over itself to cast her: she's the mother of all ice queens.
The only person who knows how to best use Stone is Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. He understands that we desire her, but can never sympathize with her, which makes her the perfect villain; a Barbara Stanwyck for the '90s. In Verhoeven's TOTAL RECALL, it took an AK-47 divorce at the hands of Arnold Schwarzenegger to put her down. But her magnum opus was BASIC INSTINCT. Her performance as Catherine Trammell embodied straight male paranoia: smarter, sexier and more lethal than anyone else, her unabashed bisexuality meant that men and women were equally disposable. Michael Douglas was ostensibly the lead, but she stole the part from under his nose. His hard-boiled cop was no match for Stone's audaciously seductive brand of evil--her swaying body, come-hither eyes and throatily profane voice turned him into a quivering, horny mess. We knew Douglas' dick couldn't measure up to her ice pick, so even Verhoeven's sell-out ending couldn't erase the fact that we had seen an ovaries-out star-making performance from Stone.
Since then, she's been smart enough to try to avoid typecasting, but not smart enough to understand her considerable limitations. SLIVER was a failure from its inception because Stone played the helpless victim instead of her natural calling, the omnipotent killer (imagine Sharon Stone as a rich voyeur-murderer and William Baldwin as a naive neo-virgin who falls under her spell; now that would have been trash worth seeing). Instead, the film died a quick death, as did INTERSECTION, which made the mistake of putting Stone in the role of the wronged wife instead of the other woman. With her career disappearing faster than her clothing, she hot-footed it into an as-yet-unreleased western THE QUICK AND THE DEAD and Martin Scorsese's upcoming gangster drama, CASINO. Unfortunately for Stone, THE SPECIALIST came out first, and even its $14 million opening weekend can't erase the stench that this stink bomb leaves behind.
It's no longer possible to make a good film with Sylvester Stallone; an veteran bomber in real-life, he now feels compelled to play one in the movies. At the start of the film, Ray Quick (Stallone) and Ned Trent (James Woods) are sent by the CIA in the mid-'80s into an unnamed South American country to take out an evil drug lord by blowing him up as he drives across a bridge. After Stallone plants the bomb, he sees that the criminal isn't alone--the man's daughter is in the car as well. When Woods refuses to deactivate the bomb remotely, Stallone races out to stop it from exploding. He fails, of course, leaving us to ponder whether life is imitating art or vice versa.
When we cut to the present, Stallone is already involved in a series of tape-delayed phone-sex conversations with May (Stone). Her parents were murdered by another drug lord (Eric Roberts) and his henchmen, so she's sworn to get even with them, even if it means sleeping with Roberts to get close enough to do the job herself. She'd like to hire Stallone, but he refuses for some unknown reason -- perhaps he needs to follow her around and watch strange men run their hands all over the body he lusts for to psyche himself up. When he finally gets angry and starts blowing people up, the Cubans bring in a bomb expert of their own to defuse Stallone. I'll bet you can't guess who that might be.
The film is cobbled together from several different movies, one for each actor. Sylvester Stallone models himself after Gene Hackman's existentially morose loner from Francis Ford Coppola's THE CONVERSATION, James Woods reprises his fast-talking arrogant bastard from Oliver Stone's SALVADOR and Stone tries on a helpless Lana Turner impression--circa 1946's THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE--for size. Rod Steiger, as a Cuban godfather, struggles to imitate Al Pacino's tour de force Cuban accent in SCARFACE, but he misses wildly, overshoots even Pacino's lackluster Puerto Rican accent in CARLITO'S WAY and lands somewhere next to Lucille Ball imitating Ricky Ricardo.
At some point, writer Alexandra Seros and director Lluis Losa should have tried to bring the actors into the same film; as it stands, everyone seems to be working from a different script, none of which is any good. Seros takes a SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE approach to suspense, which means that none of the three main characters meet until late in the film. There's a hotel room love scene between Stallone and Stone that's supposed to be explosive, but it's so sluggishly choreographed that they seem to be suffering from narcolepsy. Stallone's legendary physique was never meant to be seen completely au naturel; someone should tell him that veins popping off of one's ass isn't very attractive. At least the scene doesn't last very long, which befits the last name of Stallone's character, who seems to be saving his sexual energy for his work.
Since Stallone and Stone play the film as though it were a production of "Hamlet," Woods is left to carry the film, which he very nearly does. He isn't content to chew the scenery; by the end of the film, he's devoured the camera, the lights, the props and Stallone's elevator shoes to fuel his ferociously hammy performance. Woods has always been a volatile performer, and here he lets that side of him hang out, playing Ned as a natural-born control freak who gloats when things go his way and throws fits when they don't. Several of his scenes seem to have been included only to show how scummy he is, but his go-for-broke style makes them welcome diversions from the plot. By the time Woods pushes a fat tourist out of an elevator with the admonition, "Get a new shirt," we're rooting for him to kill off the entire cast so that he can continue his one-man show without interference.
Bad movies are nothing new, particularly for Stone and Stallone. But whenever we're watching a bad movie, there comes a point at which we stop worrying about whether or not it's going to improve; in fact, we pray fervently for it to get worse, to become so spectacularly bad that it becomes perversely entertaining: a classic ode to the power of misguided intentions. It's a measure of the witlessness of the creators of THE SPECIALIST that by the film's end, they can't even achieve that.
-- n'gai croal croaln@washpost.com
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