Cobra (1986)

Cobra arrived in 1986, a Cannon Group production in which Sylvester Stallone rewrote a Beverly Hills Cop draft into something leaner and considerably nastier. He plays Lieutenant Marion Cobretti, a Los Angeles cop with a matchstick, a Mercury coupe, and a profound allergy to procedure. The plot concerns a social Darwinist cult called the New World, which is murdering its way toward some vague supremacy, and the model who witnesses them and must be protected. The film was assembled with an X rating in its sights and pared back to an R, which tells you most of what you need to know about its priorities.

There is one element here that a modern casting spreadsheet might flag. Reni Santoni plays Tony Gonzales, Cobretti's partner, and Brigitte Nielsen carries the female lead as Ingrid Knudsen. Both are simply present. Gonzales is a competent colleague, not a statement, and Knudsen is a witness and a romantic payoff, not a platform. The film asks nothing of the audience beyond a tolerance for gunfire and a willingness to accept that the hero's methods are correct. It is a vigilante picture in the Dirty Harry lineage, and it carries the moral confidence of that lineage without a shred of introspection.

Critics at the time found it contemptible, and some of them said so at length. Time has been gentler. Drive borrowed a toothpick from it, the Razzie voters nominated it six times, and Ronald Reagan watched it at Camp David. It remains a cult object for people who enjoy a certain kind of unreconstructed action cinema. For our purposes, it is a specimen from before the current era of cultural self-examination, and it makes no attempt to participate in one. It simply wants Cobretti to win.