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June 02, 2006  With the December release of Rocky Balboa, I decided to revisit The Specialist, a movie that I saw in the theater in 1994 and recalled fondly as some serious cinematic garbage. A quadruple whammy of bad, expensive movies in the mid-90s--this one, Assassins, Judge Dredd and Daylight--put Stallone's already faltering box office muscle on life support, a state from which it has yet to recover. But calling The Specialist bad doesn't quite cover it; dollar-for-dollar, this is likely one of the most ill-conceived and incompetently executed big-budget movies of all time. There isn't space to describe all of the movie's sins, but here are a few of them: --The atrocious screenplay. It moves unceremoniously from major events that happen without warning, such as the death of antagonist Eric Roberts (!), on to random other action setpieces, leaving the audience wondering what happened. Possibly the most disjointed movie I've ever seen. --Luis Llosa and Miami. Apparently scrambling for hipness, the producers hired hot director "Lucho" Llosa, who had just made the Tom Berenger stinker Sniper, in a somewhat offensive, politically correct attempt to bring some authentic Hispanic flavor to the Miami locale. They failed. (The producers of Llosa's next movie, Anaconda, would fare better.) --Special effects that have to be seen to be believed. There's one sequence in which Stallone rigs a hotel penthouse to explode and fall into the water. The use of miniatures and blue-screens does not exactly inspire.  --Sharon Stone. The producers must have paid her a ton of money to do the shower scene with Stallone, but really, she's just terrible in this. The character, a woman seeking revenge whose parents were killed in front of her when she was a little girl, is not written with much depth, but Stone manages to make the audience think she wants to be in this movie even less than her co-stars. --The Weekend Warrior BBS. Stone contacts Stallone using a local BBS, the concept of which will baffle most modern-day viewers, even moreso because the technology is not accurately portrayed in the movie. --The music. Someone had the bright idea to hire John Barry, the legendary British composer of the Bond movies, to score this. But Barry's forte has never been writing for bad action movies, and his good but very unfashionable melodic score only drags the movie down. The Latin dance songs, selected by Emilio Estefan Jr., made me think, "Was music really that bad in the mid-90s?" --Criminal underuse of James Woods. The only thing worth watching is Woods chewing scenery, which he does with reckless aplomb in a few scenes that feel like they're from some other movie. |