Over the Top (1987)

Over the Top arrives from the Cannon Group in 1987, which is to say it arrives with the sound of synthesizers and the smell of a rental cassette. Sylvester Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk, a truck driver who arm-wrestles for gas money and hopes to reclaim the son he abandoned, a boy currently being raised by a wealthy grandfather who owns a mansion and a grudge. The plot moves from a military academy to a hospital deathbed to a Las Vegas tournament floor, pausing only for a Kenny Loggins ballad. It is a film of enormous sincerity and very little shame.

Assessed against the modern cultural ledger, the picture offers almost nothing to discuss. The cast is uniformly white, the women exist to die or to be mourned, and the emotional architecture rests entirely on a father and son learning to grunt at each other with feeling. The arm-wrestling sequences celebrate a very specific physique, the sort built in a garage with a bench press and a cassette of motivational rock, and no countervailing message about body acceptance intrudes. There is a single thematic thread here: the villain, Cutler, is a rich industrialist who intercepted Hawk's letters and sabotaged a marriage, which gives the film a faint whiff of class resentment. It is a stock melodrama device, inherited from a hundred pictures about a poor man and a powerful father-in-law, and it never hardens into an argument about wealth itself.

The film preaches nothing. It wants to sell soundtrack albums and tickets, and it does so with a straight face and a montage. The result is a relic of a moment when a studio would finance a movie about competitive arm-wrestling on the strength of one star's biceps, and audiences would shrug and hand it a B+. We classify it accordingly: a curiosity, harmless, and entirely uninterested in instructing anyone about anything.