Back in the mid-80s Stallone was at his peak of box-office domination. He’d just come off both Rocky and Rambo sequels in ’85 and his follow-up would be one of the great cinematic guilty pleasures of all time. He’d borrow Maverick’s aviator glasses, and Dirty Harry’s macho charm. He’d size down his jeans, chew on a matchstick, and introduce the world to Marion Cobretti. In a movie so 80s, after watching you may have the urge to wear leather gloves all day and sunglasses inside, drop one-liners in your everyday life, and hear a voice in your head telling you to grow out your bangs if you still have hair. That’s right, people in this episode of Magically Ridiculous we’re taking a ride back in time to 1986 and diving into Cobra.
Some people would say Cobra is simply ridiculous, with nothing magical about it. To me through, Cobra is a quintessential 80s action movie. Surely not the best 80s action movie, but one that perfectly encapsulated why the genre was so much fun during the decade especially as a kid growing up.
Now before we dive into the laughable silliness of this amazing movie let’s give Cobra its respect. It was a #1 film on its weekend of release with a $12.7M opening. It would be a #1 movie for 3 weeks and pull in $160M worldwide on a reported $25M budget. Very good money. But in 1985 Rambo II and Rocky IV both passed the $300M mark. So, Stallone’s success the year earlier inadvertently set the bar high in terms of studio expectations for his follow-up movie.
Cobra was never a movie critics were going to like. Stallone essentially drapes the structure of Rocky IV over this plot and plugs in the pieces. Cobra feels like it’s running at 1.25 speed. It’s an 87 min amusement ride of express storytelling, comical montages, macho banter, and nostalgic action that I loved as a kid and still love to this day. Stallone actually thinks he’s cool in this character. He’s selling the dialogue, soaking it up, and his blind, relentless self-confidence makes this movie an unintentionally amusing blast.
The first 15 minutes of Cobra is probably the most chucklesome stretch of action cinema you’ll ever see. It opens with Stallone railing off these statistics as the camera pans out from his cobra pistol. This rolls right into a short montage introducing the villains who are clanking axes together in an empty swimming pool. It’s hilarious. It’s like the village people of axe clankers with construction workers, doctors, law enforcement, guys in suits, and more, all clanking in rhythm of the Night Slasher who can barely even be seen as the leader of this little cult of morons. And all this, mind you, is while the opening credits are still rolling.
Then comes the grocery store shootout which is really just an obstacle course for Stallone to make his grand entrance. Because this guy with the shotgun really seems to have no plan. We get the classic foot out of the car, a quick pose for the camera and Stallone and off into the market, finding his perfect lighting, drinking beers, taunting his enemy, prancing down the frozen food section where for some reason the doors are opened, and dropping some of the best one-liners in all the history of action cinema one liners.
After a tough day of saving lives at the grocery store Stallone heads home to his beachfront apartment, rips a guy’s shirt exposing his microphone, and heads up for a cold piece of scissor cut pizza because they needed something even more ridiculous to distract everyone from the fact, he’s still wearing his leather gloves and glasses inside. From here this movie gets right into its tracing paper thin plot. Bad guys want to take over the world. They try to attack a potential witness to their actions. She gets away. Stallone’s Marion Cobretti from the Zombie Squad is called in to protect her which will be difficult because the killers have a person on the inside. Also, how cool would it have been to have gotten a Zombie Squad movie!
Now admittedly none of this much to sink your teeth into if you want a think-piece. If you want a silly self-serious 80s actioner, then somehow it all manages to flow from short chunks of expositional scene work with abrupt endings like a shooting range right in the middle of the police station. To lengthy montages to move the story and to no-so-subtly give Stallone an excuse to flex his new love interest at the time.
This entire montage is iconically cheesy, and I love it. Robert Tepper’s “Angel of the City”, Brigitte Nielson and a bunch of robots, with Sledge Hammer behind the camera, all while Stallone tracks the logo of the bad guys all over seedy underbelly of Los Angeles. It’s a complete mess and I bless the hearts of those who created it for us to watch. Now on the writing side this movie frequently reminds you that we’re not dealing with high-intelligence stuff here.
But despite it all everything in this movie gels. From the parking garage attack, the movie flows right into the attack on Stallone at his apartment, then a couple scenes later the killer strikes at the hospital. And I actually think the hospital attack is a solid scene and I think Nielson really sells it. This moves right off into the main car chase of the film, and you have to admit it’s a great sequence. It’s lengthy and filled with good old-fashioned stunt work. Stallone’s ripping all over town in his custom 1950 Mercury complete with nitro long before Fast and Furious. And despite all the absurdity of this movie, these sequences with the car launching from the parking garage and cars ripping over these overpasses still look awesome today because of the reliance on practical action.
Post attack Stallone takes the team upstate to a small town. He gets cozy with Nielson and awaits the arrival of this mysterious cult of killers so he can destroy a motel before hopping into the back of a truck and mowing bad guys down with a machine gun at dawn. This is when Cobra ramps up into overdrive and the eerie scoring, the high energy, the spectacle filled gunplay, it’s the perfect ultra-excessive closing you want for a movie like this. At this point Stallone’s near the completion of his one-man-army mission. He’s still dropping one-liners, and he’s worked his way through the higher tier villains.
So, there’s only one thing left. No 80s action romp would be complete without the final showdown and while I do think the Night Slasher in this movie was severely underdeveloped given the strong performance from Thompson. The final showdown between Cobretti and the Night Slasher in this foundry is the epitome of what the genre was all about in the 80s.
With his lady watching Stallone succeeds and hangs the Night Slasher up on the hook like a sack of laundry. He punches the cop who didn’t believe in him and rides off into the sunset on a conveniently leftover motorcycle as a completely out-of-place, upbeat rock song, closes things out to remind you how magical ridiculous what you just watched really was.
Anthony J. Digioia II © 2025 SilverScreen Analysis & Movies Never Say Die
