The Specialist (1994)

You may have often wanted to see Sylvester Stallone as a heroic terrorist bomber and Sharon Stone, aged 36, as Hot Blonde In Her Early 20s With An Air Of Mystery And Trouble. In the same film. Well, Warner Bros agreed wholeheartedly and that's what 1994 was like. This very mid-90s thriller makes the very mid-90s decision to be a hybrid of action movie and neo-noir, both of which were still runaway popular then (and, looking back, they saved the whole decade). The Getaway did the same thing, same year. Guns were briefly out of fashion in Hollywood so Stallone’s character just blows people up with explosives instead of mowing them down, a really unimprovable example of Hollywood being socially responsible. It was based on a series of 80s pulp novels I used to read and has nothing much in common with them except that he’s an ex-military guy for hire who, in every book, gets hired by a sultry babe to do a revenge hit on a Mafia boss (usually in New York, but the film goes for Miami), and in every novel he ends up having an affair with the client. Alright, I suppose it does have something in common with them, but in the film he’s called Ray Quick and in the novels he’s called Jack Sullivan (the author wrote under a pseudonym but his real name was John Shirley – same initials as his hero, worrying). Why anyone would think an action-hero should be called “Ray Quick” when he’s already called “Jack Sullivan” is a question I shall ask Allah when I meet him, although that may not be what He wants to talk about.

What makes this movie so unforgettably ok are all the smouldering neo-noir bits it shoehorns in, and all that side of it is quite good and much better than the relatively dull action side. The action side is the side with Stone’s showy version of acting scared when bombs go off, which is: she makes a wide-eyed expression and cries out sharply at every boom like she stubbed her toe and then grabs Stallone’s arm for support. It’s tremendous. Most of her acting in the film says “please cast me for your next project, I’m very professional as you can see but I feel with the right script I could do so much more.” Originally I think she delivered this message direct to camera in every scene and they cut it all out in the final edit but her performance keeps the spirit of it. She actually does have a charismatic star quality in dialogue scenes and is still the only really watchable thing in this.

The classic action film was headed into decline in 1994; this and Fair Game (also set in Miami) were two of the last mainstream hurrahs for a while. James Cameron had started the gentrification process but Michael Bay was about to complete it and everything was going to be made squeaky-clean and kid-compatible. After this, the good, violent stuff was all in the straight-to-video market, or Asian. You can see it going into the dip here, and how lifeless things become, as quick as Ray, whenever we switch to wham-ka-blammo whatever, wrenching us away from the ravishingly fake-moody style-exercise that plainly should have been the whole thing even if it meant making a straight thriller that didn’t cast Sly in the first place. When the action is the boring bit of your premier action star’s new movie, the genre might be diagnosed as unwell. Stallone’s next film was Assassins, which, despite being written by the Wachowskis, was much less (or even less) entertaining than this and a sad indicator of the safe, harmless, pointless direction mainstream action films were taking, along with a strong hint that Stallone’s career was about to go south for a while. There were a few years after this when we would have gladly taken another movie like The Specialist, which at least has fun intermittently dressing up as Body Heat before it finally resigns itself to a bunch of dumb fireballs. To be honest, John Wick aside, I would even take this as a welcome improvement in action films if it came out now.

The other thing that was a big deal about The Specialist was how sexy it was supposed to be. “Sexy” is a distant memory in a mainstream film circa 2020 but it was all the rage back then. This has a big Sylvester Stallone-Sharon Stone-sex scene, which film historians now refer to by the acronym SSSSSS or the Big Triple Double S Of ‘94.  I remember all the critics went out of their way to say how much they hated!, or scoffed at!, or were so bored by! the sex-scene, which made it rudely obvious they were all biting their knuckles when Shaz got her kit off. I must admit I never had a problem with it personally, even if it’s choreographed like a 1970s avant-garde dance piece. What really didn’t work was the amazing attempt at sexy dialogue. Stallone and Stone are supposed to trade saucy innuendoes at one point, for no logical reason considering they’re adults and could just say. I appreciate that it’s a much loved tradition, from Shakespeare no less, and from Bond to the kind of vintage porn wink-wink lines we get here, but this is the only time a script-writer has ever actually seemed to believe they make the scene hot and raunchy. It would take some genius acting to make that happen, so: Stone does hers in a comedy-sketch version of a phone-sex voice, Stallone does his like he’s worried someone’s going to overhear. In fact, every scene where there’s supposed to be steamy tension between them, he veers into a weirdly beefy version of a dirty old man. But all the innuendo lines are catastrophic fails anyway. They should have had some English people write them, double entendres have been our only mode of communication for centuries. “The explosions you cause must be...earth-shaking.” “Never you mind about that, ducky!” Phnar!

The villains are played by James Woods over-acting exhaustingly and Eric Roberts under-acting sleepily, and Rod “I was in Dr Zhivago, I played Napoleon once, you’ve got to believe me” Steiger who must have been in his 70s. Is it any wonder the film only really lives when Stone is on the screen? Everything about it is a time-capsule, including everyone being cool by smoking all the time, and including how great it looks; random 90s movies were pretty stunning visually and even a disposable thing like this gets all sorts of effort put into some inventive shots and casually gorgeous lighting. The whole “bombs are nicer than guns” thing makes Ray Quick look like a horny white ISIS by today’s standards, but the swanky style and the music – by John Barry! With proper 60s Bond type tunes – do so much heavy lifting that we used to breeze along with the hero doing all these terrorist attacks, we weren’t really bothered. Of course this film is terrible but, actually, great compared to what came later, so time has been kind to it just by time being really bad. I watch it in a wistful trance, reminiscing on what we used to take for granted as only average or, possibly, rubbish.