Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992)

Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot arrives from 1992, a buddy-cop comedy in which Sylvester Stallone plays a Los Angeles sergeant whose mother, played by Estelle Getty, moves in, buys him a machine pistol from the back of a van, and solves his case. The picture is remembered chiefly as an anecdote. Arnold Schwarzenegger, by his own cheerful admission, feigned interest in the script to lure his rival into taking it. Stallone has called it the worst film of his career, which is a crowded field, and the Golden Raspberry voters handed it three trophies.

For our purposes, the film is a near-total absence. The cast is white to its bones; Black performers appear in small supporting turns as cops and bystanders, and the screenplay never glances in their direction. Race is not a subject here, nor is sexuality, nor the body, nor the mind, nor the climate. JoBeth Williams plays Lieutenant Gwen Harper, Joe's superior officer, a detail that could suggest an institutional point about women in the department. It does not. She exists to be romanced and briefly furious about roses she did not receive. The villain, a crooked businessman named J. Parnell, runs an insurance fraud and gun-smuggling operation, the sort of villainy that has padded out crime pictures since the silent era. No critique of capital attends it. He is a man who must be shot in the shoulder.

The result is a sitcom stretched past its natural length, four episodes of a show that was never picked up. There is no sermon, no lesson, no moral instruction of any kind. The film is too busy being witless to lecture anyone. In an era when pictures increasingly arrive with a thesis attached, this one offers a mother, a machine gun, and a title Stallone reportedly hated saying aloud. We can respect its refusal to preach while regretting nearly everything else.