A Man of Few Grunts and No Beeps Cobra

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

All action movies tend toward the abstract. Once the moviemakers establish a persuasive motive for one set of characters to spend some time and much energy chasing another set of characters around, the truth (or falsity) of these pictures must be looked for in the staging and cutting of the subsequent shoot-outs and chases. In judging those, the brain gratefully surrenders to the viscera. In a sense, these films, so dependent for their success on mastery of movie technique, represent one of cinema's purest forms. And all action movies may aspire to be judged not on the basis of how well they imitate life, but on how well they imitate the genre's ideal form--a Road Runner cartoon.

The formula sounds simple enough. But there is a hidden subtlety in it, which lies in the business of motivation. It is sufficient unto the length of an eight-minute animated short subject that Wile E. Coyote have an inexplicable obsession with capturing a pestiferous bird. If, on the other hand, we were asked to spend an hour and a half in the company of this immortal pair of mortal enemies, we would require some word beyond the occasional "beep- beep."

Take the case of Marion Cobretti (Sylvester Stallone), already better known to readers of the movie ads as Cobra. A man of few grunts (and no beeps at all), he is a member of the Los Angeles police departmentment "zombie squad," which means that his specialty is wasting homicidal psychopaths without much ado about Fifth Amendment rights. In the present instance they are coming at him in serried ranks, all members of what seems to be a satanic religious cult, whose chief form of worship is serial killing. Ultimately their evil energy is focused on a model, played by Brigitte Nielsen (Mrs. Stallone in private life), who is the only witness to one of their crimes. Assigned to protect her, Cobra reluctantly (indeed, spiritlessly) falls in love with her. But this is presented as a distraction from his main line of business, which is to polish his arsenal in preparation for the climax in which he wipes out the whole mob of "sickos" in a single confrontation.

This is handled well enough by Director George P. Cosmatos (though not quite as well as he did in Rambo II). But so what? Sly Stallone the screenwriter has let down Sly Stallone the actor. At their variously primitive levels, Dirty Harry worked because its protagonist was so emotionally committed to his antibureaucratic and antilegalistic attitudes. Death Wish worked because a man was avenging the brutal death of his wife, and Rambo II worked because Stallone's character was so determined to rescue his wartime buddies from a Vietnamese prison camp. In each case, these heroic passions were sufficient to disarm--at least for the length of the film--the audience's humanistic objections to the means used to gain the desired ends. In other words, their moral fervor canceled out our moral qualms.

Cobra's dispassion, his amoral languor when he is not squeezing off a few rounds (and even when he is), evokes not even queasy sympathy, much less rooting interest. One starts to study action-movie technique for want of anything to think about. And that's not good enough to keep the viewer going either. The best one can say for Cobra is that it is too dopey to pose any threat to the highest values of the republic. May the rest of the movie summer be similarly absent of malice.