Sylvester Stallone's 18 best (and 5 worst) movies

Bigger brains than us may argue that Stallone’s ultra-violent 1986 cop thriller Cobra belongs on our worst list instead of our best list. But any movie where Stallone, playing a psychotic good guy blasting holes in psychotic bad guys, says to a perp threatening to blow up a supermarket, “that’s okay, I don’t shop here” can’t be all bad. Granted, Cobra was ripped to shreds by critics who noted its over-reliance on genre tropes and brutal violence. And they’re not wrong. Directed by Rambo: First Blood Part II helmer George P. Cosmatos and written by Stallone, the movie is a Neanderthal-level reaction to the era’s increasing amounts of urban violence which it addresses with gleeful amounts of urban violence. Famously, the movie came to be after Stallone rewrote the original script to Beverly Hills Cop—in which he was attached to star—removing the comedy and adding more action. When the studio rejected it in favor of a movie that would actually be good, he turned his ideas into Cobra. With his leather jacket, Aviator glasses, and ’80s-style quips, Stallone zooms past ultra-macho and into the stratosphere of the ridiculous. Cobra—which co-stars Stallone’s then-wife Brigitte Nielsen as the insultingly helpless damsel in distress—may be Dirty Harry for the lowbrow crowd, but now it plays as a mouth breathing load of laughs.

Back in the ’80s, when a scene involving two heterosexual men in the shower with a bar of soap was the height of comedy, Stallone and Kurt Russell jumped on the buddy cop bandwagon with 1989’s Tango & Cash. In the film, Stallone plays the buttoned-up LAPD lieutenant next to Russell’s rule-bending LAPD lieutenant. When they’re both framed for murder by the villainous Jack Palance, comedy often-enough ensues. Stallone and Russell do have a certain amount of chemistry, presumably forged from a tacit agreement to not take any of this seriously, which only undercuts our strong desire to dismiss the film outright. In what was surely a for-hire Hollywood gig, the movie was directed by Russian-born Andrey Konchalovsky who, four years previously, directed the devastatingly good, Oscar-nominated prison break drama, Runaway Train. Konchalovsky was fired by producer Jon Peters three months into Tango & Cash’s production due to disagreements over the film’s ending— Konchalovsky wanted serious, Peters wanted comedic—and the result is not only cheeseball city but it treats Teri Hatcher, as Stallone’s sister, with all the disrespect inherent in such misogyny-inflected machismo. Stallone isn’t quite up to the task of selling some very bad dialogue and bargain basement quips. Then again, if you think dunderheaded exchanges like this one is your cup of tequila; “How come your gun’s bigger than my gun?” asks Cash. “Genetics,” answers Tango, then this punch- and chase-a-thon is for you.

A year before Rocky would change his life forever, Stallone got third billing in Death Race 2000, a Roger Corman-produced cult classic about a transcontinental car race that entertains the citizens of a totalitarian future America. Sly plays one of five drivers competing in the 20th anniversary of the race, one where running down pedestrians earns the driver bonus points. David Carradine stars as a legendary driver named Frankenstein because of his mechanical hand (it can shift gears in less than 1/20th of a second!) and Sly is right on his tail until the end of the race. This is certainly not one of Stallone’s more challenging or notable performances since he mostly has to sit in a car and scowl. However, it is one of the more clever and entertaining examples of the dystopian sci-fi genre that blossomed in the ’70s as Cold War moviegoers waited patiently for nuclear annihilation. Ever the opportunistic genius, Corman dreamt up the movie to capitalize on Norman Jewison’s Rollerball, about a violent roller derby in a dystopian future that starred James Caan. Death Race 2000 doesn’t really have much to say about totalitarian governments but as a low-budget riff on the popular car race comedies of the time, like The Cannonball Run and The Gumball Rally, it’s fast-paced fun.

Like many aging franchise action stars, Stallone is not above revisiting past glories. Much like Rocky Balboa’s numerous returns were rarely knockouts, Sly’s multiple revisits to Rambo Land were a mixed bag. The first two films (released in 1982 and 1985) satisfied audience’s Reagan era desire for Rambo to re-fight the Vietnam War and question the actions of the U.S. government. By the time he made Rambo, 20 years after the release of Rambo III, Americans were weary of hearing about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and the war in Afghanistan. So for this new film, Stallone went another route; he took his ferociously violent stand-in for American wartime disillusionment and stuck him in exile in Southeast Asia until he’s called upon to rescue a group of Christian missionaries who had brought medical supplies and the Good Word to the people of Burma. At first blush, the film seemed like a series of misjudgments; Devout moviegoers would be turned off by a film so violent, and the rest would wonder why Rambo came out of exile for a cause most people knew little about. Still, it did well as audiences thrilled to Stallone shooting, stabbing, punching, and disemboweling members of Burma’s military government in order to save members of the country’s Karen ethnic minority. Burma’s problems, of course, were (and are) very real, which Stallone addresses with badass bandana-sporting looks, big weaponry, and a Western movie sense of American grit and superiority. It shouldn’t work but it’s still pretty satisfying.

No one would confuse Stallone with a social satirist, but the in-jokes and topical jabs are the best parts of his generally successful mix of ’splosions and spoofs, 1993’s Demolition Man. In the technologically advanced future world of 1996, a cop played by Stallone and a criminal played by Wesley Snipes are cryogenically frozen in a Cryo-Penitentiary after a hostage situation goes sideways. When Snipes is defrosted in 2032 and begins wreaking havoc on the good people of San Angeles, Stallone is defrosted and sent to stop him. The movie, directed with workmanlike flair by Marco Brambilla, is enlivened by a script (co-written by Heathers’ Daniel Waters) that presents 2032 America as a sterile Utopia where all manner of bad behavior, including salt, smoking, swearing, and alcohol are illegal. It’s no wonder the cops—led by Sandra Bullock as Lenina Huxley, whose parents managed to steal both of her names from Brave New World—are bored. Stallone tosses off his one-liners with a paycheck-job insouciance, but there’s funny stuff here; the future Franchise Wars have ended with every restaurant now a Taco Bell, while lounge singers croon the Jolly Green Giant jingle, and citizens can visit the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library. If all this sounds like an overlooked Idiocracy, the film is too beholden to action-movie dictates to enter that rarefied realm. But the laughs are legit and Stallone looks great in his high-collared police getup, for whatever that’s worth.

In Rocky III, the champ has become rich, lazy, and adoring of fame, and some may consider that Stallone’s savvy and self-incriminating dissection of his own life at the time. But the two films Stallone released between 1979’s Rocky II and 1982’s Rocky III were Nighthawks and Victory, real-deal films that should have legitimized him as a real-deal actor (Victory was directed by the great John Huston). If both were critical and box office disappointments, they still speak to Stallone trying to up his game. So it’s understandable that he’d scurry back to his cinematic safe house where he wrote and directed a familiar-feeling sequel that still managed to give the franchise’s increasingly well-worn characters other notes to play. In the film, Rocky’s brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young) expresses jealously at the champ’s success, while grizzled trainer Mickey (Burgess Meredith) admits he’s been lining up fights against palookas to protect Rocky from another devastating loss like the one to Apollo Creed. Meanwhile, Mr. T plays Clubber Lang, the proto over-the-top Rocky opponent and a foe so formidable that only a montage of Rocky training over Survivor’s Eye Of The Tiger can save him. At this point, Stallone was able to slip back into the role like a worn pair of boxing gloves, and the film goes the distance on that basis. But the seeds of future ridiculousness were starting to sprout. Not until 2006’s Rocky Balboa would the character feel grounded again.

In 2010, Stallone was in his mid-60s and a bit in the career wilderness. With his two franchises on ice (Creed was five years away and Rambo: Last Blood was nine years away), he did the next best thing; he created a new franchise, one that combined The Dirty Dozen formula of combat ready, superstar team-ups with AARP-appropriate, self-deprecating jokes that, to quote another franchise, suggested they were too old for this shit. Thus was born The Expendables series, which reached its Botox-lifted zenith with 2012’s Expendables 2. Here, Stallone is joined by Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose combined age exceeds the age of the universe. But as an exercise in VHS-era nostalgia whose charms manage to emerge from the dust and debris of its endless explosions, Expendables 2 is a whole lotta lowest common denominator fun. It’s more enjoyable than the first film and seems more comfortable with, if not proud of, its outsider status within the action film pantheon. Stallone directed the first Expendables but passed the bullhorn on this second one to Con Air’s Simon West, presumably giving Sly ample time to practice his mumble. Liam Hemsworth shows up and looks like a 6-week-old baby next to these aging action icons, but it’s hard to knock a film that collects every cheesy monosyllabic comeback and puts them into one rock ’em sock ’em film.

Viewers of a certain vintage may remember what got butts in the seats for Cliffhanger when it was released over the long Memorial Day weekend of 1993: its trailer which was set to Mozart’s requiem, “Dies Irae,” a gloriously unique choice for that era. Oftentimes, though, great trailers make for bad movies. But such was not the case with Cliffhanger, directed with crowd-pleasing glee by Die Hard 2’s Renny Harlin. Indeed, there’s no cliff left unhung in one of Stallone’s finest action hours, even if his emotional heavy lifting leaves something to be desired: the guilt his character, mountain rescue ranger Gabe Walker, feels over the death of a woman in the film’s exciting prologue, is mostly conveyed in squints and grunts. Otherwise, Stallone, who is famously afraid of heights, shows off his impressive musculature as he successfully reestablishes our love for this big lug of an action hero. Speaking of action, it’s nonstop, pretty fantastic, and in service of a perfectly fine story involving a failed mid-air heist that leads to three suitcases full of cash being strewn around the Rocky Mountains and the bad guys enlisting a reluctant Stallone to help find it. As the villainous ringleader, John Lithgow twirls a good mustache while Michael Rooker (The Guardians Of The Galaxy series) plays Gabe’s friend, Hal. A formula thriller all the way and the better for it, Cliffhanger was a hit for Stallone at a time when he needed one; his previous two releases were Oscar and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.

The trailer for director Norman Jewison’s labor union drama F.I.S.T. claims it’s a “motion picture achievement that will be talked about and remembered for years to come.” Well, insert joke here because that wound up being a slight miscalculation. F.I.S.T. was Stallone’s follow up to Rocky, and while history has been unfair to the film, the fact is that Sly fell into the hubristic trap of believing his own hype and, after Rocky’s underdog success, wanting to make a Very Important Film. The movie is the decades-spanning story of Johnny Kovak (a name that sounds absolutely nothing like Jimmy Hoffa), a lowly Cleveland dockworker in the 1930s who becomes a virtuous labor leader who is not immune to eventually trading his integrity for power. Stallone is good in the film with his soft and pleading voice—one of the last times we’ll hear it as he climbed the action hero ladder—that soon gives way to galvanizing pronouncements in favor of organized labor, which soon gives way to total corruption. Stallone rewrote most of future Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’ script seemingly with one eye on the typewriter and the other on a TV showing The Godfather. But even if the film falls short of its aspirations, it still has plenty of powerful moments, with Jewison staging some stirring scenes of labor unrest and Stallone trying hard to craft a compelling character in a sprawling work that tried, with moderate success, to connect with the times.

If nothing else, Victory is a great way to win a game of Six Degrees of Separation, since now you can connect Stallone with The African Queen director John Huston. The film, which sees Huston in a rare, crowd-pleasing mood, is grandly satisfying and given heft by solid performances from Michael Caine and Max von Sydow. In the film, Stallone plays an American prisoner in a World War II camp who joins an Allied soccer team formed to compete against the Nazis in a match concocted to demonstrate German superiority. It’s based on a true story, which is to say there really is a game called soccer and there really was a World War II. Otherwise, the film ditches all manner of realism and becomes a rousing “just go with it” slice of mainstream entertainment where life in a POW camp doesn’t seem all that bad; at one point Stallone escapes the camp, checks in with the French Resistance, and then purposely gets recaptured, all with the danger and suspense of a lovelorn teen sneaking out of his bedroom to see his girlfriend. The movie features plenty of real-deal soccer stars including Pelé and others who most soccer-ambivalent Americans had never heard of. Stallone was probably miscast in this, if only because it’s hard to keep up that musculature in a POW camp. But he represents America in the film as only Rocky can; he’s loud and bullying but with a can-do desire to help the team win.

By the early ’70s, a struggling Stallone had appeared in nearly a dozen films, but the roles were so insignificant that in only one of them did his character even have a name. In fact, he was ready to quit acting to take up painting and writing until the 1974 drama The Lords Of Flatbush permanently sent into the rear-view characters like Soldier in Catering Area and Subway Thug #1. Here, Stallone hones his sensitive lug persona as Stanley, part of a leather jacket-clad Brooklyn friend group in the 1950s that also includes a pre-Happy Days Henry Winkler, Paul Mace, and Perry King (who took over the role after Richard Gere was fired). Much like 1973’s American Graffiti—which also understood that kids of the ’50s were now adults of the ’70s craving films about the good old days—The Lords Of Flatbush is an aimless hangout movie where a tight knit group of teens bust each other’s chops and try to “go all the way” with various girls. Unlike American Graffiti—a slicker film, and the last film George Lucas would direct before Star Wars—The Lords Of Flatbush is maybe a little too aimless for its own good. But it has a raw, low-budget honesty that location filming in Brooklyn and shooting in 16mm ably accentuates. As the fiancé who ain’t buyin’ no engagement ring on consignment, Stallone was basically auditioning for Rocky. In fact, Flatbush co-director Stephen Verona admitted that if producer Robert Chartoff hadn’t seen Stallone in The Lords Of Flatbush he wouldn’t have produced the boxing classic that would forever cement Sly’s legacy.

Given the Oscar-winning success of Rocky, it’s no wonder Stallone and United Artists would basically want to make the movie over again, which they did with rousing results in 1979’s Rocky II. Stallone also directed this one, even though his previous—and very first—directing assignment, 1978’s Paradise Alley, was a critical and commercial dud. Oddly enough, Stallone’s self-indulgent directing style in Paradise Alley would be more suitable for the Rocky sequel, given how much audiences had fallen in love with the character and craved an overblown, haymaker-filled rematch between him and Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). All the major players from the first film return for the second, including Talia Shire as Rocky’s wife, Burt Young as Rocky’s brother-in-law, and Burgess Meredith as Rocky’s trainer. And Stallone, as screenwriter, finds enough new notes for them to play—even if they trend towards the soapy—to suggest he’s properly invested in the characters. In fact, the last wisps of the series’ credibility can be found here until Stallone attempted to reconnect with the character’s—and maybe his own—underdog roots in 2006’s Rocky Balboa.

One can only imagine how contemporary audiences would react to the climactic moment in 1981’s urban cop thriller, Nighthawks—which won’t be spoiled here—but given today’s sensitivities, it might be enough to relegate the film to the worst pile. But the movie is not so easy to dismiss. It’s an odd fit for Stallone, although he’s quite good in it, and it’s refreshing to see him in a film that tries to siphon off some juice from Three Days Of The Condor, The Day Of The Jackal, and other such thrillers of the time. Here, a long-haired and bearded Stallone wisely underplays the role of a New York City cop on the hunt for an international terrorist played by Rutger Hauer in his Hollywood debut. The film could have benefited from a director more experienced than Bruce Malmuth (nominally a better fit than original director Gary Nelson from gritty TV shows like Gilligan’s Island). Still, it’s got great location work, a solid supporting performance by Billy Dee Williams as Stallone’s partner, and some exciting sequences, including the hijacking of a Roosevelt Island cable car. In Nighthawks, it’s good to see Stallone make choices as an actor—and as a chooser of material—that he’s often too enmeshed in franchise filmmaking to indulge in.

It took a while but in 2006’s Rocky Balboa, Stallone finally comes to terms with the age of his most iconic creation in a satisfying sequel whose sense of melancholy seems genuine coming from an actor who’d long since lost interest in playing anything close to recognizable humans. Instead of being a professional underdog (that’ll come later in an improbable, if inevitable, final boxing match) we find the champ on the rocks personally: His beloved wife Adrian has died from cancer, he’s not on speaking terms with his son (Milo Ventimiglia), and he runs an Italian restaurant in Philly where he’s reduced to regaling customers with tales of past glories. Stallone, who wrote and directed the film, never asks for our sympathy or our pity. He simply does the best he can to provide a reasonably believable accounting of what this character at age 60 would experience. It’s pathos and humility achieved honestly and with the hard-earned knowledge that, well, Rocky V sucked. So whether Stallone was embarrassed into reinvigorating the franchise in a more intimate way or he wanted to use the character to confront his own aging process, it still works. Rocky Balboa is the second best Rocky film without the word Creed in the title.

Fairly or unfairly, Stallone has never been known for his acting ability, which happens when you’ve been happily existing as a slab of action hero meat for the better part of 45 years. That Stallone finally wanted to change such a perception is admirable. Even more admirable is that he succeeded with a performance in James Mangold’s 1997 drama Cop Land that altered our perception of him, if only temporarily. Stallone gained nearly 40 pounds and worked for scale to play Freddie, the docile, hearing-impaired sheriff in a pretty little New Jersey hamlet populated by the tough cops who work across the river in New York City. With his heavy walk and stooped shoulders, Stallone earns his spot next to a caliber of actor well above his pay grade, including Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. Sure, by the end Stallone picks up his rifle and starts blasting, but he never lets his action hero mannerism creep in, dialing down his performance to the very last frame. Cop Land is a terrific film, a pulpy and character rich tale of corruption and moral awakening. Stallone never attempted such a persona-shedding performance again, which is a shame.

Much like the Rocky series, the Rambo series fell into such blood-soaked disrepair by its umpteenth sequel that we fail to remember its promising beginnings. Indeed, 1982’s First Blood, in which Stallone plays a Vietnam vet who runs afoul of a small-town sheriff played by Brian Dennehy, contains a grand total of one on-screen death. For those counting, Rambo: First Blood Part II had 69 deaths, Rambo III featured 132 killings and 2008’s Rambo featured a franchise record 236 grisly dispatches. The point is, for those who’ve understandably written off the series, it pays to return to the original, a mostly sympathetic action drama that feels as emotionally attuned to its main character as such a film is likely to get. Stallone landed the role after every other actor of note (including Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman) was considered for the part. So with Stallone as the ex-Green Beret, we already have an inkling of the type of movie we’re getting. But Sly remains respectful of the character and his final speech where he tells the story of a fallen comrade is one of his finer moments. The movie doesn’t skimp on the action, which trades on the irony of Rambo using everything he learned to survive enemy attacks in Vietnam to survive attacks by his own countrymen in his own country. Forget the sequels, where Stallone bloats into an increasingly ridiculous stand-in for American might and righteousness and stick with the only great film in the series.

In 2015, with the Rocky franchise on the canvas where it belonged, director Ryan Coogler—coming off 2013’s acclaimed indie drama Fruitvale Station—achieved the impossible; he resurrected Rocky Balboa and placed him alongside an entirely new character to create a fresh and thrilling spin-off that reinvigorated a tired series. Creed is a streamlined and modern rocket ride of a movie powered by the beat of an old-fashioned heart: Stallone, wearing old man glasses and with a face that droops ever so slightly with age and sorrow, gives his best performance since the 1976 original—a low bar, but still—and was, we’ll say it, robbed of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar he was justifiably nominated for. Michael B. Jordan is ferocious yet honest as Apollo Creed’s illegitimate son, while Coogler proves himself a director with contemporary sensibilities but a classicist’s sense of story and character. As for Stallone, who is essentially playing the Burgess Meredith role from the original Rockys, he’s so good that we (almost) forgive all the blockheaded nonsense that constituted too much of his career to that point. Creed gave Stallone the victory lap he deserved and made us appreciate him in a deeper way.

Many Stallone fans would put Creed at the top of this list but there would be no Creed without Rocky and there would be Stallone without Rocky. The film’s underdog origins are well documented; he wrote the film in an apocryphal three days; he was inspired by unknown boxer Chuck Wepner sending champion Muhammad Ali to the canvas in a 1975 bout; producers offered Stallone $330,000 to not star in it; and so on. While it made Stallone an instant icon, Rocky didn’t provide audiences a glimpse of what Stallone would become. It provided audiences a glimpse of what he refused to become; in Rocky, Stallone was authentic, sensitive, emotional, doubtful, and triumphant in defeat. He’d mostly abandoned these attributes in his later, action oriented work. But at the time, Stallone was as much of an underdog as his most famous creation. And audiences loved Stallone’s story as much as they loved Rocky. Directed with a gritty sense of urban loneliness and button-pushing genre expertise by John Avildsen, Rocky won the Best Picture Oscar in 1977 in arguably the greatest best picture race ever, defeating All The President’s Men, Network, Taxi Driver, and Bound For Glory. The scaffolding upon which Rocky is built may be familiar, but the performances, Bill Conti’s music, and the inspiring notion that a decent, unheralded nobody can earn their way to self-respect, make Rocky an all-time classic that launched the career of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Over The Top is the unfortunately apropos title of Stallone’s 1987 clunker, one that supersizes Rocky’s underdog formula by adding every sports movie cliché possible until it becomes a sweaty, noisy, and dunderheaded laugher. Even worse, it takes place in the “who gives a shit” world of arm wrestling, which allows Stallone to face any number of, well, over the top competitors including one nutjob who chugs an entire can of motor oil before facing him. In the film, Sly plays Lincoln Hawk (a B-movie name if there ever was one) a down on his heels trucker and absentee father forced to become the best dad ever when his estranged wife dies. Lincoln’s journey to fatherly greatness is impeded by the kid’s wealthy grandfather, played by Robert Loggia. The only surprise in Over The Top is that it was co-written by Stirling Silliphant, who won an Oscar for co-writing the 1967 Best Picture winner In The Heat Of The Night. Stallone’s upfront payment of $12 million (an enormous sum at the time) wasn’t a safe bet, as his career in the ’80s was listing between Rocky and Rambo sequels, underperformers like Rhinestone and Lock Up, and the embarrassment of directing the ill-fated Saturday Night Fever sequel, Staying Alive. Over The Top sees Stallone assuming any movie where he’s an underdog will connect with audiences. But it’s hard to see him as an underdog when he’s being paid $12 million for a movie that’s only a few degrees away from looking like a Saturday Night Live parody.

In some corner of the multiverse there is a planet where Sylvester Stallone energetically warbling “Old MacDonald Had A Farm” would be considered funny. For the rest of us, the 1984 quote-unquote comedy Rhinestone was Stallone starring in a vanity project where he takes a satirical blade to his macho persona, which is its own kind of ego trip. The biggest crime in the film, directed by A Christmas Story’s Bob Clark after original director Don Zimmerman was fired, is that Sly drags national treasure Dolly Parton down with him, playing a country singer who bets her manager that she can make a country singer out of Stallone’s tough New York City cabbie. Stallone acts as if audiences will automatically find his sequined outfits and bad singing to be endearing and self-effacing. This supposed bravery was a direct result of Stallone reworking Field Of Dreams writer/director Phil Alden Robinson’s original script to make it more about his character and less about Parton’s. And, try not to act surprised, Stallone finds another way to play the underdog, this time with a climactic scene where he tries to win over the rowdy patrons in a New York City bar with his country singing. Aggressively broad and filled with creaky cornpone jokes, Rhinestone earned only $21 million on a $28 million budget. No wonder his next two films were sequels to Rambo and Rocky.

The only thing Get Carter, the exhausting and unnecessary remake of director Mike Hodges’ 1971 British crime classic, did right is repurpose Roy Budd’s supremely cool opening title music. Otherwise, Stallone inaugurated his 21st century filmography with this overdirected bomb, the first in a half dozen-long string of career-threatening choices. Stallone’s co-star in this testosterone-fest is not Alan Cumming, Mickey Rourke, or even the original’s Michael Caine, but his wardrobe, a bespoke collection of designer suits that suggest the sophistication, meticulousness, and vanity of the actor wearing them. This is an Armani Menswear fashion show as crime thriller and it’s lit, shot, and edited in a way that makes Tony Scott look like John Cassavetes. As a Vegas mob enforcer on the hunt for those who killed his brother, Stallone underplays the dialogue in trying to bring pathos and heft to a film more enamored of its style than its characters. Had the original not existed, Stallone’s Get Carter would have been dismissed as a routine and numbing exercise in upmarket nihilism and empty style. But remaking a classic by ignoring what made it great and treating it as a star vehicle for Stallone was enough to get this mob story whacked.

Four of the five films on our list of Stallone’s worst are comedies. That’s no coincidence. There’s simply nothing funny about Stallone, possibly because he’s already his own parody; the monosyllabic mumbles, the often cartoonishly large musculature, and the career filled with hypermasculine action heroes already has us halfway to rolling our eyes if the punches and explosions weren’t distracting us. Stallone proved his lack of comedic chops in 1991’s Oscar, a 1930s-set farce where he broke the cardinal rule of screwball comedy; he announced to the audience that he was being funny. The key to any comedy is taking everything seriously but Stallone, possibly feeling he had something to prove after Rhinestone, played it for laughs and not very well as his line readings and double takes were heavy and mannered. Director John Landis, who knows his way around comedy, either couldn’t help or refused to help and he delivered only an approximation of the great comedies that inspired his film. The movie is based on a 1967 French farce and tailored for Stallone who plays Snaps Provolone, a Depression-era crime boss trying to fulfill a promise to his dying father that he’ll go straight. In Oscar, Stallone was up for the challenge. He just wasn’t up to the challenge.

The supremely unfunny Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot wasn’t just a joke on paying audiences; it was a joke on Stallone. In a now-famous story, Stallone’s action movie rival Arnold Schwarzenegger faked interest in the film to trick Sly into agreeing to star in it. Of all the criteria we could have used to choose our number one Stallone stinker, being tricked into making the worst film of your career is pretty much the ultimate. Stallone is a cop whose overbearing mother, played by Golden Girls star Estelle Getty, comes to stay with him and soon becomes the key witness to a murder. Sly, previously established in Oscar as a lousy comic actor, gives it his all, possibly because he knows he made a mistake but can’t get out of it. Directing with a studied indifference to inspired comedy by Roger Spottiswoode (Tomorrow Never Dies) the movie is a parade of strained one-liners and groan-inducing jokes written on spec by Blake Snyder and punched up by William Osborne and William Davies, who wrote Schwarzenegger’s infinitely better foray into comedy, Twins. A sense of desperation permeates the film, best exemplified by Stallone standing in the middle of the street wearing a diaper and yelling, “mom, I don’t wanna be changed!” If you have a soft spot for our worst Stallone film ever, well, let’s give the last word to Sly: “I made some truly awful movies. ‘Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot’ was the worst. If you ever want someone to confess to murder just make him or her sit through that film. They will confess to anything after 15 minutes.”