Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago - The Ultimate Director's Cut

Writer-director Sylvester Stallone returns to Rocky IV for a (belated) 35th anniversary Director's Cut, determined to trim and repackage his hyperbolic feature until it provides a more obvious point of connection with the rest of the punch-drunk boxing series - particularly the two most recent entries, Ryan Coogler's Creed and Steven Caple Jr's Creed II. Stallone's most obvious alterations then are focused around the character of Apollo Creed, unearthing unseen footage and alternative takes then sewing them back into the film in an attempt to massage the character's previously ignominious death towards some note of dignity. This director's cut also begins with a truly massive recap section, played upfront and presumably for neophytes, that slashes Rocky III down to eight minutes of footage centred around the moments where Rocky and Apollo's relationship thawed, transforming from a bruised-up rivalry into a dear friendship. 

Stallone and project editors Dov Samuel, Justin Barham and Kate Prescott have completely reorganised Rocky IV's first act, deleting Paulie's birthday party, and the rickety robot that his brother-in-law presents to him, to find more space for Carl Weathers and a kitchen corner for Talia Shire's worried Adrian. Weathers benefits the most in this assembly, his Creed elevated from an afterthought in Rocky's Cold War battering arc to an active participant in his own, curtailed, story. With Rocky unenthused by challenges from Drago and his Russian entourage it's Apollo who lobbies for, then receives, the exhibition fight with Dolph Lundgren's Soviet superman. The former heavyweight champion explicitly doing so out of a misplaced sense of patriotism - one lost on the comfortably oblivious Balboas. In the theatrical cut Apollo assumes this sacrificial lamb role out of pure plot mechanism; here Stallone splices around his own indifferent boxer, allowing an anxious Apollo to fill the frame and speak to his friend about geopolitical concepts that - quite apparently - have never occurred to the Italian Stallion. 

Structurally, the fight between Apollo and Drago is completely different here too. Stallone and his editors weave a palpable sense of unease into the deliberately bombastic proceedings. While Apollo dances around with James Brown to Living in America, the film focuses on the grim expression taking hold on the faces of Adrian and Sylvia Meals' Mary Anne Creed. There is no submission to the gaudiness of the pre-fight spectacle. While Drago has been colour corrected to the point where he seems to be radiating light, Apollo's cavorting strikes a note of mania or, perhaps more accurately, desperation in this edit. Weathers plays a condemned man trying to bluster his way through an impending death sentence. Speaking of wives, Drago's other half, played by Stallone's ex Brigitte Nielsen, has been almost completely excised from the film. Ludmilla's role has been reduced to little more than a neutral glance between herself and Mrs Creed and the moment where she allows Drago's handler, played by Michael Pataki, to place a cigarette in her mouth - an interlude that has always suggested a note of sexual impotence in Lundgren's technological titan. 

The decision to omit so much of Nielsen's performance is disappointing - even suspect given Stallone's marital history with the actress - but the deletions do somewhat align a 1985 character - who was, originally, aggressively personable - with the Ice Queen seen in the second Creed film. 2018's Ludmilla, now cushy with the golden oligarchs running modern Russia, goes out of her way to reject her former husband and their child, essentially consigning them to an ongoing exile in Ukraine. Generously, you could offer then that Stallone was simply reaching for a sense of unity with the Caple Jr film rather than, say, picking at a personal grudge. With Nielsen's character all but erased Stallone instead uses Lundgren to suggest a (malfunctioning) human element within the Soviet machinery. Following his fight with Creed - in which Ivan has been used as an unthinking proxy to level a blow against the United States - Drago starts chanting his own name, over and over, as if on the verge of a tearful breakthrough. A programming blip that seems to suggest that the Russians are pumping their prize boxer full of something more than just steroid cocktails. 

Originally screened at 1.85:1, this re-aligned cut crops the image to cinemascope dimensions, Stallone further focusing the eye on contorting faces as the beats powering his film's edit. It's an assembly edict not completely dissimilar to the one Stallone and director John Flynn employed for their prison film Lock Up. There the weather-beaten extras conferred weight on an otherwise light story; here Stallone's choices seem indicative of a nostalgic affection for many of his fellow cast members. Thankfully, none of Rocky IV's unassailable training montages have been altered or re-ordered to any significant degree. If anything these MTV sequences are buoyed by a modern sound mix that discerns discrete layers and electronic separation in Vince DiCola and John Cafferty's adrenalin hammered music. As with the opening Creed bout, the Moscow set sequence that concludes IV has been completely reworked. Stallone's director's cut uses pounding repetition, and overlapping, multi-channel intensity, to place the viewer inside the action. IV now generates a panicking back-and-forth, not just in terms of the physical assaults battering away at Rocky and Drago but also the confidence-sapping glances they each take at their horrified loved ones. This decision - coupled with a foley design that suggests wooden clubs striking meat - leaves the audience with the unshakable impression of having witnessed two beasts, locked together in agony, pulverising each other. 

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Tango & Cash

Tango & Cash has the germ of a great idea - it seeks to embrace the absurdities of 1980s action films and transform them into knowing, winking, entertainment. Who better to captain that ship than Sylvester Stallone? The star was already synonymous with egotistical self-regard, spending the decade transforming his screen persona from that of credible actor into a rolling depiction of Christ's scouring. Couple that with the writer-actor-director's inability to find hits outside of his two proven franchises (not to mention Schwarzenegger's successful transition into comedy with Twins) and Tango & Cash's appeal becomes clear - Stallone wanted to lighten up.

Reading around the film's troubled production, the most singular creative perspective comes from former hairdresser and noted arachnophile Jon Peters. The executive's unceasing quest to lampoon the decade's sweatiest genre saw the film burn through several directors, beginning with Andrei Konchalovsky (a frequent collaborator of Andrei Tarkovsky's) and ending with Purple Rain's Albert Magnoli. Stallone himself is also alleged to have spent a significant amount of photography at the helm but, for a control freak like Stallone, that's about as remarkable as discovering night follows day. It is this interference and incessant compromise that ends up defining the finished film.

Tango & Cash pairs Stallone with Kurt Russell, the duo playing wrongfully imprisoned cops looking to clear their names. Stallone is the highly strung yuppie policing for kicks, while Russell takes a zen surf cop designed around Patrick Swayze and transforms him into something closer to a big, adorable dog racing around in stone washed jeans and a trick boot. Tango and Cash start off as bitter rivals, each trying to outdo the other. Success is measured by how many newspaper inches their crime-fighting exploits eat up. Both cops keep tabs on their rival's copy and chuckle / groan accordingly.

Following their arrest, the two don't so much become fast friends as a couple in the making. In Lethal Weapon and its sequels we watch as Mel Gibson's scruffy, suicidal stray is gradually folded into the order Danny Glover's household represents. The closeness of their relationship is organised in familial terms with Riggs ending up something between Murtaugh's wayward little brother and an adopted son. Fraternal bonds are key to these buddy cop films, indeed their stories tend to motor along in step with the character's blossoming relationship.

Alpha examples like 48 Hrs. start from a place of contempt, thriving on their lead's differences. The case and a mutual desire to pursue it being the only common denominator. Tango & Cash skews this formula by making its heroes so similar - they're both overachieving cops with only cosmetic differences. Stallone's wardrobe and Russell's unkempt hair aren't profound ideological differences, they're minor variations on the same basic mould. This underlining similarity, as well as the couple's mounting co-dependency, seems to suggest that the film might be heading somewhere truly different by having the pair develop a romantic relationship. Then the film recoils, course-correcting by crowbarring in Teri Hatcher as a stripper for the two to bicker over before they limp towards an unusually gadget heavy finale.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Lock Up

A handsome but routine amble around the prison yard. Lock Up sees Sylvester Stallone's Frank Leone dragged away from a minimally secure, weekend release haven and dumped into Gateway Prison, a mud streaked correctional facility built out of equal parts rust and tetanus. Frank's unforgivable crime? He really upset Donald Sutherland's needy Warden Drumgoole by escaping from one of Drumgoole's previous postings, thus torpedoing the brush cut WASP's career.

In its early moments Lock Up sets the stage for some sustained antagonism with Drumgoole pushing Leone to his physical and mental limits in an environment that resembles a Soviet labour camp. Rolling Thunder director John Flynn complies with this conceit, amping up the unpredictability factor by crowding his frames with genuine, weathered prison faces and real-life nutter Sonny Landham. This pressure cooker plotting quickly falls apart though, and soon enough we're stuck watching a basic incarceration narrative unspool.

Despite its adult rating, Lock Up only really proposes danger. We spend far too much time in chummy environments watching healthy, well-fed actors spit balling their idea of prison camaraderie. Stallone should be an albatross around his friend's necks but, unfortunately, most of his best buds make it into the final act relatively unscathed. Likewise, a final, suicidal confrontation between Leone and Drumgoole suggests both a glorious immolation and an opportunity for Stallone to do some death-by-cop acting. Of course, the One Noble Guard comes to the rescue, ending the film on a back-patting love-in instead.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Rambo III

Rambo III is simplicity itself. Divorced from a modern framing inclined to laser in on the dissonance created by having Rambo fight alongside the Mujahideen, Peter MacDonald's film is basically Cowboys and Indians relocated to Afghanistan. James Cameron's First Blood 2 screenplay, not to mention the successful film it spawned, kickstarted a mini-movement of high-tech action epics centred around steely-eyed loners. Cannon recruited Chuck Norris for their Missing in Action series, while Arnold Schwarzenegger muscled in at Fox with Commando, an obvious attempt at emulating Stallone's success.

Each knock-off diluted Cameron's original black ops concoction, toning down the politics and Soldier of Fortune trivia to arrive at a breezy sequence of events that allow a hero to murder his enemies in interesting and inventive ways. Commando proved to be particularly notable in this regard, introducing rusty gardening implements into the action man arsenal, and providing even more connective tissue between shoot-out films and slashers. Schwarzenegger mangled his victims with the same detached, dispassionate efficiency as Jason Voorhees.

John Matrix cuts a similar hulking but chaste shape as his Friday the 13th doppelganger, happy to evoke the same overpowering but sexless masculinity. Under Schwarzenegger these films were safe, kids raised in-front of Masters of the Universe or the WWF could score a video rental and experience the transcendental thrill of on-screen mutilation without any of the obvious baggage associated with actual pain and suffering. Rambo III builds on this conceit, paving the way for the likes of RoboCop 2 and Predator 2, and is itself the key example of a violent film series explicitly repackaging itself in an effort to appeal to children.

Accounting for these home screening mutations results in a psychologically lighter film than its predecessors. Stallone and his co-writer Sheldon Lettich (Bloodsport and Lionheart / AWOL: Absent Without Leave) craft a Rambo free of the obligations that Vietnam burnt into him. When Colonel Trautman finds Rambo in Thailand he's shed his nationalism and maybe even his Christianity. Just in case we think he might have turned soft, we're introduced to John acting as a blunt instrument to raise funds for a crumbling temple. Rambo is still happy to offer up the safety of his body for what he deems to be a worthy cause.

Importantly, Rambo isn't exactly what you'd call happy here, he just has purpose. A low-impact role in an endless refurbishment job that could comfortably occupy decades. Rambo may have rendered himself emotionally neutral but he's still allowing himself to be used as a tool. His role at the monastery may convey virtue but it's an assignment that deliberately fails to make full use of his incredible talents. Rambo III then starts to build towards a place where the titular hero could truly feel at home. After refusing Trautman's call, John is eventually dragged to Afghanistan to rescue his ageing (incompetent) commander after an unsuccessful run-in with an airborne Soviet general.

Rambo: First Blood Part II proposed catharsis as a way of healing its hero. Rambo was given the opportunity to correct the mistakes made by America during the Vietnam conflict. He represents a response to the Rock 'n' Roll war that is somehow both surgical and wilfully primitive. Rambo didn't need napalm or Agent Orange, he had a quiver full of arrows. First Blood Part II's Rambo is the Vietcong's guerrilla tactics cannibalised and regurgitated back at them. The film pushed deep into wish-fulfilment territory too by having Rambo confront and kill the Soviets bankrolling North Vietnam's quest for reunification.

Rambo III goes further still, placing Stallone's chewed-up ubermensch inside another East vs West proxy war, only this time he gets to fight alongside a unified front of indigenous people. Afghanistan is a framing device for Rambo, designed to strip the character of any lingering sense of internal conflict. The Mujahideen's struggle against the Soviet Union's blitzkrieg campaign is presented as just and decent. Stallone is moving his character beyond personal revenge into a state of benevolent, international, altruism. He wants to help and, more importantly, the people of Afghanistan are happy to be helped.

MacDonald's film doesn't just posit a political synchronicity between Rambo and the people he meets in Afghanistan either. Rambo III stresses a sense of belonging for the nomadic hero, it gives him a home. The Mujahideen are portrayed with the same kind of macho shorthand as Rambo - they're tough and self-reliant, a tribe of taciturn men who express themselves physically rather than verbally. Rambo instantly fits in, asserting his place in the pecking order with an electrifying, ego-stroking, buzkashi performance. This is the root of Rambo III's biggest failing, it doesn't follow through on the idea of a Rambo happy to live out his days amongst the gallant people of Afghanistan. We are denied a sense of conclusion.

Stallone and Lettich are instead content to file off John Rambo's last vestiges of uncertainty, aligning the character's silver screen portrayal with the action figure seen in his syndicated cartoon spin-off. The audience is being reassured, they aren't to worry, we've moved beyond complicated, cloudy matters of post-war identity into a binary state of good vs evil. Rambo III is the Reagan Doctrine as action entertainment, movie stars gleefully rolling back the tide of Communist expansion. With that as a starting point, it's no wonder the film is so deliriously untethered. This is apex Dead Red cinema. Stallone not only breaks into, then out of, then back into a makeshift Gulag, he stares down an entire battalion of jeeps and attack choppers, each one bristling with machine guns and missiles.

This is the fun of Rambo III, it runs on contempt. There's no reality in its confrontations, Rambo is simply here to win, the star of his own $65 million Wild West stunt show. Faced with an army's worth of death zooming straight at him, John simply jumps out of the way and into a waist-deep hole. Naturally, that's enough to confound the USSR's finest. The film reduces the entire Soviet-Afghan conflict down to a hyper expensive game of tag with its hero as a spoilt brat who'd rather change the rules on the fly than lose. Everything is grist for the Stallone ego machine. Shrapnel, far from being a debilitating setback, is instead just another opportunity for Stallone to assert his hero's all-consuming hard man credentials.

Faced with an oozing gut gash, Rambo loads the wound up with gunpowder then sets himself alight, Stallone literally burning out even a suggestion of weakness. With this psychotic self-surgery episode in mind we arrive at the crucial difference between Stallone and his weightlifting rival. In films like Commando or Raw Deal, Schwarzenegger's body is largely presented as a bubbling, cosmetic, delight. He's complete and comforting, an exploded, towering father figure designed to make an audience feel safe. Stallone's aesthetic, particularly when playing Rambo, is completely different. He puts you inside the addictions that power this brutalised frame. If Schwarzenegger's body represents health and vitality, then Stallone's communicates pain and obsession.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Over the Top

Sylvester Stallone's brief dalliance with The Cannon Group concludes with Over the Top, a picturesque, would-be tearjerker direct from company head Menahem Golan. Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk, an absentee father looking to reconnect with his son before the film's climax press-gangs him into an all-consuming arm-wrestling contest. Over the Top does little to tap into Stallone The Star, his take on Hawk is reserved bordering on flat. Golan instead uses the actor as the personification of inexpressive masculinity.

Despite a few airbrushed posters focused around Stallone's steely, action-ready musculature, Over the Top takes a different tact for the majority of its runtime, unspooling from the perspective of his onscreen son. David Mendenhall's Michael is a child trapped in the company of a parent he doesn't know or really understand. Hawk is a wandering trucker obsessed with bicep expanding repetition, Michael is a hesitant, fragile little boy boxed off to a military academy by his mobbed-up Grandfather so he can learn how to sneer at poor people.

Like all remote, emotionally cool movie fathers, Hawk struggles to comprehend a child that is an individual rather than an extension of himself. Hawk pushes his son into emotional and physical arenas that he has himself mastered with the intention of stressing their innate, biological kinship. Conflict demands Michael fail outright but in the end an ill-advised arm-wrestling contest with a diner tough becomes a confidence builder for the son rather than an opportunity for the father to manage his peculiar expectations. Disappointingly, Over the Top isn't interested in Michael failing or Hawk growing.

Over the Top has the constituent parts to create something quite interesting. Stallone was living, breathing pop culture at this point while Mendenhall is able to communicate a real sense of desperation - although the child star displays a relentlessly toothy smile, his eyes are wide with real mania. Whether or not this is actual acting or simply the boy's physical reaction to playing against Rocky is irrelevant. It works for the character. Unfortunately, Stallone isn't asked to do anything as taxing as love a child that doesn't measure up to his own brawny standards. Over the Top is all the poorer for that.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Cobra

Sylvester Stallone and his regular fall guy George P Cosmatos join forces with Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan's Cannon Group to deliver Cobra, an 87 minute splatterfest that finds connective tissue between straight-to-video slashers and street-sweeping law enforcement. Stallone plays Marion Cobretti terminally cool, like Arthur Fonzarelli starring in his very own European violence comic. Cobra stands as the LAPD's last resort, a Zombie Squad stick-up man who's happy flashing Giallo blades when he's not steaming around in a battleship grey Mercury Eight, hunting wrongdoers.

In Cobra's world regular cops are ineffectual wimps with limp pistols and even limper politics. Only Cobra has the stones - not to the mention the cavalier regard for due process - to really muck in and get the job done. Cobra is Dirty Harry's mutant offspring, an unrestrained avenger driven by simplistic, knee-jerk posturing and supermarket tabloid headlines. Callahan cleaned up San Francisco with a fetishised six shot revolver, Cobretti's task is so great he requires a misshapen Finnish sub-machine gun that fires explosive, car shredding, bullets.

Stallone's narrow, insistent focus compliments the more deranged aspects of Cobra's future-shocked premise. Although barely explored, the film's central threat is a wave of hysteria that has penetrated every level of society, compelling construction workers, yuppies and even police officers to meet in concrete pits to bang axes together. Stallone isn't interested in the logistics or thought processes behind this mania, it's just an interesting image he can match to a foreboding percussive beat.

As with Staying Alive and the last two Rocky films Stallone is generating mood and excitement out of abstracted movement, the aesthetic jumble of MTV's emotional editing as a method of pure narrative delivery. Stallone, ever the populist, is using this language to compartmentalise the elements of film that don't interest him - motivations are fixed, pat even. Good is good and evil is just evil. In this universe, Cobretti's fascistic hatred of lawbreakers is positioned as the only sane response to a society that is happy to gnaw its own leg off.

The film is a lark, Stallone and Cosmatos have built themselves a towering, two hour monument to eradication, then hacked it down to the bone to appease ratings boards, greedy distributors and, most importantly, Stallone's own ego. Asked to deliver a sub-90 minute wheeze for the Top Gun crowd, Stallone dialled into that film's sweaty regard for the muscled male as a desirable object. Despite Brigette Nielsen's presence, no-one here is shot more adoringly than Stallone.

Cobra pores over its subject, not so much as the kind of efficient, muscled machinery that drives the rival Schwarzenegger films but as a cool, aspirational personality. The film lingers on Stallone. Every gesture, every discursive bit of waffle the actor employs to wrestle the audience's attention back to him is up there on the screen. Stallone warps the basic mechanics of police procedurals, rendering every building block but himself brief, if not elliptical.

This narcissism doesn't actually harm Cobra though. If anything it elevates it, transforming a landfill policer into a brisk, energetic horror show. Cobra iterates on Nighthawks, solving a lot of that film's problems in the process - LA-LA Land is a more conducive environment for Stallone's ego trip, while Brian Thompson's performance as The Night Slasher never overwhelms Stallone they way Rutger Hauer did. Cobra signals a sea change for Stallone, he's no longer retreating from the larger-than-life status that Rocky and Rambo have conferred, he's embracing it, seeing if he can apply himself to a different formula.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Rocky IV

Sylvester Stallone is an incredibly manipulative director. There's no finesse in his approach, he doesn't trust you to put two and two together. He lambastes his audience, rubbing their faces in his agenda. He doesn't insinuate, he smears. That's exactly why Rocky IV is so excellent. Stallone has finally stopped trying to use his increasingly creaky writing to deliver his sermons, arriving at a style of communication that unfolds like a barrage of adrenaline-pumped commercials. In Rocky IV the writer-director uses montage to underscore the sheer scale of Balboa's dilemma. The sports movie staple is transformed from an expositional short-hand into the film's dramatic and emotional backbone. Editors John W Wheeler and Don Zimmerman deliver several successive sequences that encapsulate not only the very real, physical progress Rocky needs to be able to confront his foe but also the athlete's headspace. It's not just the boxer's body that is growing, Balboa is sharpening his mind too. He picks apart his recent past, holding on to certain memories as the grist needed to power himself through the final battle.

Thousands of miles away, Dolph Lundgren's Drago trains alone in a series of enormous empty spaces, bathed in blaring reds and bolstered by an enthusiastic course of performance enhancing injections. Stallone presents the Russian as basically a robot; there's clearly an insinuation that Ivan has been grown in a lab somewhere with the express purpose of humbling America before the world. Drago has zero tangible motivation beyond success. His wife hovers around him like a disconnected WWF valet and when the giant speaks he always sounds like he's on the verge of a tearful breakdown. He's a monster, a manufactured man, trapped and endlessly reconfiguring himself amongst sterile, terrifying machinery.

Rocky's training is completely different. He journeys, by request, to a remote, snowy corner of the Soviet Union, tuning his regime around basic, homely tasks. He doesn't need a state-of-the-art tilting treadmill, he has an actual mountain to climb. Drago's gym sessions are about an enforced isolation, the Party confining him in an environment tailor-made to enhance him physically. They drug and push him until his personality is all but obliterated. The boxer is whipped and tested until he has completely retreated into himself.

Stallone shows us - tells us - this is how Drago can be defeated. He has no will of his own, everything is imposed upon him by his superiors. He's a soldier following orders whereas Rocky is a man making decisions. It's no accident that Stallone follows a series of shots illustrating the Russian's passive acceptance of steroids with an image of Rocky crushing his opponent's likeness. Stallone is assuring us that Drago has already lost. All the writer-director needs to do now is state a convincing enough case for this defeat. Rocky III proposed complacency as its hero's Achilles' Heel. Home comforts and arrogance combining to kill Rocky's all-consuming desire to win. III gave us a Rocky that no longer had anything left to aspire to. He'd won. Rocky IV acknowledges the tonal missteps surrounding this dramatic dead end and how it mutated the perception of the Clubber Lang character. This time Rocky has learnt his lesson, he is taking his opponent seriously, knowing that he is clearly the underdog. The boxer understands from the get-go that he will have to elevate himself. Stallone also takes time within this environment of total exercise to underscore how important Talia Shire's Adrian is to Rocky and, by extension, the film series as a whole.

Brigitte Nielsen and Lundgren's characters are always separated, they never really occupy the same physical or filmic space. They are apart by design. Comparatively, Adrian is portrayed as a crucial component in Rocky's ability to truly succeed. Her arrival in the Soviet Union - after first refusing to follow Rocky - interrupts the film's incessant montaging, forcing us to sit with a quiet moment in which husband and wife slowly circle each other, acknowledging their need to be together. Adrian is then folded into the fabric of Rocky's physical exertion, nodding decisively as her man pushes himself beyond his limits. Adrian is her husband's rock, offering love and unconditional support, two things Drago absolutely does not have. Rocky's geographically remote training also serves another purpose - it re-establishes the boxer as a working class hero. The misguided, millionaire pageantry of Rocky III is gone, replaced by a laboured, soulful communion with the people and land of the Soviet Union. While Drago roams around his gilded cage, Rocky is mixing it up with the locals: chopping their wood, righting their antique carriages. He's becoming immersed, reminding himself what it is to be a commoner. The politics of Rocky IV may be naïve and hopelessly optimistic in terms of the real value offered by the American regime but Stallone is still able to communicate an underlining note of sincerity.

Rocky doesn't arrive as a conqueror, he comes willing to learn. Drago's country has shaped the Russian boxer into something truly fearsome. By billeting with his team in a snowy wilderness, Rocky is attempting to experience this transformative quality for himself. The American rejects the hospitality of the state to bunk with farmers. He pushes himself by wading through snow drifts and mantling hostile terrain. Rocky is absorbing a defining aspect of the Russian national character - endurance. Rocky's pig-headed desire to force himself through his body's limitations not only makes the admiration he later receives from the Soviet crowd understandable, it was actually inevitable.

Finally Stallone uses a substantial amount of the last match to demonstrate and stress Rocky's physical and martial failings. For a start, he's too short to box the towering Drago: Rocky must leap to strike his opponent's face. Then there's the fact that he never makes any attempt to protects his head. Over and over again we see Rocky soak up Drago's reality warping blows and beg for more. It's insane but what better way to appeal to a nation that fed millions into the meat grinder to halt Hitler's march east? How could the average Russian not admire Rocky's fortitude, his suicidal belligerence? Following Drago's petulant, childish declaration that he fights only for himself it is Rocky that better exemplifies the emotionally remote, taciturn attitude of this home crowd. 

With this in mind Rocky IV isn't so much about a cultural victory for capitalism and The American Way as it is a sombre acceptance that the United States and the Soviet Union are united in their appreciation of pure, unthinking force. Throughout the 1980s Sylvester Stallone used tales of assailed masculinity to try and confer a mythic, almost religious quality to his image. As Rambo: First Blood Part II demonstrated, Stallone was happy to junk an airtight action screenplay if it meant he could spend more time filling the cinema screen with his neoclassical mug. Rocky IV then represents his most complete, exhilarating attempt yet. The writer-director takes his simple, lovable boxer from Philadelphia and elevates him to the level of demigod. Rocky, backed by Vince DiCola's celestial workout music, wins by not losing. He sacrifices his body and, as we learn in Rocky V, his mind to batter at ideological barriers and earn not only his opponent's respect, but the adulation of America's most terrifying enemy.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Rambo: First Blood Part II

Rambo: First Blood Part II is the polar opposite of the accepted, prize-winning, way in which the Vietnam War was being presented in American cinema. Instead of the usual strung out, psychedelic chaos, Rambo imagines the conflict as a household task that has simply been neglected. America didn't lose the war, it just forgot about it and moved on to something else. In that sense Rambo is emblematic of the rhetoric that drove the Reagan administration - the film was about making the country great again. James Cameron was contracted to write the sequel to First Blood, the writer-director dashing it out alongside a new draft of The Terminator and his Alien sequel, whilst waiting for Arnold Schwarzenegger to finish up his contractual obligations to Conan the Destroyer. Cameron's script, entitled First Blood II: The Mission, is a sombre continuation of Ted Kotcheff's film that begins in the bowels of a psychiatric hospital then goes on to explore the post-traumatic stresses that haunt Rambo.

As he displayed with apex sequels Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Cameron has an innate sense of where to take a character next. Cameron approaches his writing from an almost psychoanalytical perspective, drawing out internal conflicts as a means to construct plot. Like Ripley, Rambo must return to the scene of the crime and exorcise his demons through conflict. Only then can his past trauma be resolved. As with Ripley, Rambo is elevated by his past experience. They are both uniquely able to shoulder the responsibilities ahead because of the suffering they have endured. It's interesting then to see how Sylvester Stallone approached this material for his rewrite. He retained the mythic, prowling, sense of an unfettered Rambo but deleted much of the supporting architecture. Cameron's draft, taking in frazzled fly boys, a co-starring role that screams John Travolta and intense, body-shredding violence (that Stallone would go on to employ in 2008's Rambo) is jettisoned. Cameron's writing made himself the star, an avowed military nut working his way through all the data and anecdotes he'd assembled whilst researching CIA black ops. Stallone doesn't need any of that. He's the star, he's the machinery.

Stallone's take on First Blood Part II begins in a quarry, with John working hard time cracking rocks. The star's physique is tanned and intense, despite his incarceration. First Blood's emaciated attack dog is gone, instead we have a Muscle & Fitness pin-up. We're instantly keyed into a state of glamorous unreality: Stallone will fight the Vietnam War again, single-handedly, and this time he will win. Rambo then marks a clear cultural shift. Any event, no matter how recent or mired in defeat, could be used to tell a Cambellian tale and sell some licensed merchandise. Lured back in-country by a POW rescue mission, Rambo immediately nixes his surveillance brief and attempts to get one of the prisoners out. Despite a heroic effort dragging some half-dead GI across endless, exploding paddy fields, Rambo is betrayed by his superiors and left to rot. So begins the scourging of Rambo, Stallone piling on the hurt for his very own Battle Christ. At a loss how to proceed, the Vietnamese soldiers holding Rambo call in their Soviet superiors to physically and spiritually destroy the American super soldier.

Despite having enough electricity ran through his body to dim the local barracks, Rambo refuses to break. It's only when his skeletal companion is threatened with a blazing knife that the hero agrees to comply. What makes Rambo so notable then is his total lack of complication. He's just a walking job, searching for appropriate purpose. He doesn't even respond well to the rigid structure of military life, only taking orders from his beloved father figure Colonel Trautman. He has to believe in the mission. First Blood proposed a man seeking validation for the sacrifices he made in war. First Blood Part II goes beyond that, making America itself the source of his resolve. It's his religion, the strength he uses to surmount difficulty. Rambo represents an idealised, inflated version of the flag-waving, patriotic US citizen. Unlike the CIA spooks that cooked up this non-mission, he doesn't ignore the suffering of his fellow soldiers. He embraces it, then transforms it into his own. Rambo would rather be put through the wringer himself than see another grunt suffer.

This notably Catholic conception of Christianity is everywhere in Stallone's films. The Rocky series tracking a simple man through a variety of rebirths, usually in-step with the actor's own fortunes. Staying Alive turned the idea of relentless exercise into a kind of self-flagellation. Tony Manero broke his body down and rebuilt it for the opportunity to take his place in Broadway's pantheon. Rambo goes one further, engaging with the punishment and destruction that facilitates the saviour's triumphant resurrection. The film is explicitly reaching for iconography, Stallone cluttering the film up with adoring, obsessive, close-ups. His eyes heavy with regret, his head held in repose, like a Renaissance painting. Stallone and his favourite yes-man George P Cosmatos are attempting something new. This is the action movie as a healing prayer, salving the frayed American psyche and offering a Messiah that won't look the other way or turn his cheek. Instead he'll climb into a Huey attack helicopter, lift himself into the air, then obliterate America's enemies with whirring mini-guns and belching missile pods.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Rhinestone

Excretable culture clash shite that, ambitiously, tries to sell Sylvester Stallone as a comedic proposition. Sly plays a gruff New York cabbie mugging opposite a beleaguered night-club singer, played by Dolly Parton, who boasts she can turn anyone into a credible country musician. Rachel's Dad from Friends (Ron Leibman) pops up as a sleazy club promoter who never looks Parton in the eye. In fact, no-one in Rhinestone can resists the urge to appraise Parton's chest, not even the actor playing her father.

Rather than approach his image from a playful, ironic distance (like Schwarzenegger), mandatory screenplay rewriter Stallone inserts himself into an undercooked Pygmalion, hoping that his mumbly, arrogant charm will carry the film. It doesn't. As if to reassure the audience that yes, they are in fact watching a comedy, Black Christmas director Bob Clark inserts shots of his actors chuckling through Stallone's terminally unfunny antics. Parton manages a cheery sincerity throughout, her snickers communicating the good-natured kindness of an indulgent friend.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Staying Alive

Rocky III trumpeted Sylvester Stallone as a director able to divine bracing imagery out of noise. His style is a rough jumble of telephoto snooping, grimacing close-ups and pop video assembly. In that sense Sly is the perfect choice to chronicle Tony Manero's plunge into fleeting, plastic fame. Staying Alive picks up a couple of years after Saturday Night Fever with Manero struggling to break onto Broadway.  

Remembered as a misbegotten sequel, Staying Alive does come on like a toothless retooling of its predecessor, deleting an extended cast and any associated grime in favour of all-consuming exercise. Dancing is no longer Manero's release, it's the totality of his experience. Even serving drinks in some yuppie beer hall, Tony slinks rather than clods, weaving in and around the boozed up dancers like a self-satisfied snake.  

As Manero is consumed by dance, so too is Staying Alive. Stallone shoots long, dreamy sequences of practice and repetition. John Travolta's coiled, sinewy body is dwelled upon to a fetishistic degree. Stallone painting an immortal record of this lithe, actualised form, his eye hovering somewhere between a Jane Fonda jazzercise vid and Shinya Tsukamoto's all-consuming love of musculature. 

Staying Alive's certificate may be family friendly but Manero is still the exact same arch, emotional manipulator he was in Fever. Everybody is grist. Every encounter, no matter how personal, is transformed into an opportunity to climb. Manero himself seems only dimly aware of this coercion while Stallone's film is not only non-judgemental, it depicts his power over women as a positive. 

Manero's emotional abuse isn't just tolerated, it's the ability that facilitates his crowning glory - having successfully fucked his way into a starring role in some absurdly expensive interpretive dance nightmare, Manero hurls his leading lady aside to perform a wholly unsanctioned dance solo. The stage director's objections die in his throat, drowned out by an audience screaming their approval. 

Saturday Night Fever promised a positive change in Tony. We left that film assured that there was a chance that he might be able to evolve to the point where women registered as actual people, rather than just something pliant he gets to jab his dick at. Staying Alive has no such pretensions, it doubles down on a venal little lizard that will do or say anything to get his shot at fame. 

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - First Blood

Sylvester Stallone has a great look in First Blood. His body is pallid and wiry, teetering on the edge of malnourished. As an outline, it's worlds away from the inflated, oiled musculature of the later instalments. Stallone's physique isn't the draw here, instead it's a tool, a coiled visual signifier in a despondent film about being chewed up then spat out by an uncaring world. Complimenting the star's brutally svelte form is a long, unkempt hairstyle that acts as a frame for his face. The mop sits like a pair of drooping Basset Hound ears, drawing out Stallone's massive, brown eyes. In Rocky III, Stallone shot his own face to suggest sternness, a massive patriarchal figure struggling to make sense of his messy extended family. 

For First Blood, Ted Kotcheff and cinematographer Andrew Laszlo use Stallone's eyes as a way to communicate a frazzled, bestial, calculation. John Rambo is always cautious, constantly running angles and assessing his predicament. Undermined by a brace of sequels that revelled in increasingly bloody violence, First Blood distinguishes itself by focusing on a character that is reluctant to do any real damage to his opposition. The Police and National Guard that chase Rambo up into the hills aren't engaged as an equal threat. Instead he stalks them, bleeding and undermining, demonstrating a withering assessment of their position in the pecking order. Rambo's violence is a calculated attempt to assert a terrifying level of dominance - he doesn't intend to kill his pursuers, he'd rather scare them off. Rambo just wants to be left alone.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Rocky III

Writer-director-actor Sylvester Stallone takes a different tact with the third Rocky outing, arriving at a film that's as much about the numbing effects of money and fame as it is boxing. After several successful defences of the title he won from Apollo Creed, Rocky discovers that his manager has been secretly arranging squash matches to dodge challenges from genuine competition. The deception has a profound effect on Balboa, undermining his achievements and leaving him with an acute case of imposter syndrome.

Conflict rooted in ego drives Rocky III. Just as the title character has to overcome a paralysing lack of self-esteem, every other player is in search of personal validation that can only be conferred by locking horns with Balboa. Inveterate scumbag Paulie wants to be whisked up and given a job despite his unending negativity; Apollo Creed would rather set aside months building Rocky into a fluid fighting prospect than spend time with his own family. Mr T's elemental Clubber Lang has the most to overcome. He needs to conquer this evasive champion to get where he needs to be.

It's not like Lang doesn't put the work in either. While Rocky burns money transforming his training regime into an embarrassing expo event, Lang knuckles down, exercising alone in an environment that resembles the crawl space beneath a murderer's house. Shouldn't we be rooting for this loner? Is Rocky's gauche Scarface lifestyle supposed to be aspirational? Rocky III flips the underdog narrative on its head, asking us to cheer for an established and explicitly unearned status quo. Lang is too violent, too temperamental, too black to be the hero. Despite the two boxers sharing the exact same motivation - the paralysing fear of being poor in Reagan's America - it is assumed that the audience instinctively believes that one of these fighters is worthy to hold the title while the other is not.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Escape to Victory

Sylvester Stallone ticks a box in Escape to Victory. A proven box-office draw, his presence guarantees a certain amount of interest from the otherwise cool-on-football American market. Like Steve McQueen before him, the star also lifts his allied internment film out of the staid, and faintly comedic, situations of The Wooden Horse into a realm of bombast seen in something like The Great Escape. Regardless of whether or not the idea rings true historically, British prisoner of war films tend to revolve around bait-and-switches that have more in common with knockabout boarding school capers than a life and death struggle. 

Accordingly, Stallone's interloping brings a sense of desperation to Victory. While everyone else concerns themselves with training for the upcoming, all-consuming, football game, Sly's character Hatch takes time to run angles on the guards, looking for a chance to slip out of the camp. Stallone's is an outsider perspective, to the point of mostly existing within his own sectioned-off, VIP story. While Michael Caine and Max Von Sydow wrap themselves up in romantic notions like sportsmanship and post-war European brotherhood, Stallone has leveraged himself a subplot that takes him to Paris and gets him romancing Carole Laure's resistance contact. Since Director John Huston and screenwriters Evan Jones and Yabo Yablonsky are more interested in the big game as an opportunity for escape rather than an event unto itself, Stallone's contractually mandated holiday does a lot of the dramatic lifting.

Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - Nighthawks

Sylvester Stallone kicks off the 1980s with Nighthawks, a slack and improbable potboiler that reaches for William Friedkin style verisimilitude but instead ends up a Neanderthal example of the star's scowling bruise 'em ups. Stallone and buddy Billy Dee Williams play a pair of insufferable New York cops drafted onto a terrorist extermination squad seemingly because everybody else on the force hates their guts. The duo spend weeks being screamed at by a self-impressed British spook while Rutger Hauer's eurotrash assassin prowls around the city, murdering women and planning a series of topical explosions.

Ghost-directed - at least in part - by Stallone, Nighthawks offers long, rambling, takes that land like conceited acting exercises. There's none of that marching powder pep the director would later bring to Rocky IV on display in either the framing or the editing. Nighthawks works best as a document, the pivotal moment that Stallone stopped trying to establish himself as the next Pacino and embraced his more violent, guttural, instincts. The immediate benefits of this transformative thinking are apparent within Nighthawks. Hamstrung by a meandering screenplay, Stallone eventually finds he is better able to hold his audience's attention with close-up grimaces or macho declarations rather than by pretending to be a real human being.