Release Date: 1994
IMDB Description: A woman entices a bomb expert she's involved with into destroying the mafia that killed her family.
At first glance, The Specialist seems like it could be something halfway decent. 90s Stallone, Sharon Stone, and explosions, a recipe for a hit.
The trailer looks alright, but then again, when do trailers ever make a movie look terrible? (That’s an impressive feat for a movie to accomplish—do the exact opposite of what a trailer is supposed to do.) From the preview, I understand Stallone and Stone’s characters will be an item, obviously, but it looks like it’s got a dramatic, mysterious aspect.
On Rotten Tomatoes, it’s at 10% from critics and 29% from the audience. On IMDB. It’s at 5.6/10.
Where this movie really stood out is in the form of the Golden Raspberry Awards. For people not familiar with this organization, it gives out awards to the worst movies of the year. The Specialist was nominated in five categories and walked away with two awards, for worst screen couple (Stallone and Stone) and worst actress (Stone). Not a bad evening!
Even with all this in mind, I still had hope for this film. The story is what gets bashed. I personally can get over that. If the story sucks but it otherwise delivers as an action movie, it can still achieve “great entertainment” status, which is a worthy title to hold.
At the end of the day, the best test is watching it, and that’s exactly what I did.
A perfect analogy for this movie would be that of a low- to mid-tier car with loose, wobbly tires. If you speed up, the tires will increasingly wobble. The movie was never a head-turner, and when it ramped up, the wheels wobbled alright and came off.
It starts more on the slow side, and that’s the part I enjoyed. The first third, which is the establishment part and the beginning of the juicy stuff, was digestible. The gist of it all is that Stallone is an ex-CIA bomb expert who lives in Miami. The very first scene is a flashback of him and his partner having a falling-out. James Woods plays his ex-partner; he brought some moxie to the table, but I wouldn’t call it spectacular either.
Back to present day, Stallone’s character, who’s named Ray Quick, has had phone conversations with a woman (Sharon Stone as May Munro, alias Adrian Hastings), who wants his services to kill a trio of local mafia-linked men who were involved in the killing of her parents when she was little. She wants to meet him face-to-face, which Ray doesn’t do. Instead, Ray stalks her while listening to their phone conversations and takes the occasional photo. He observes May getting close to the mob bosses’ son, Tomas. She plans on taking them all down without Ray since he isn’t helping.
Ray has an attraction towards May; that’s pretty clear from the creeping. The only problem is that it just doesn’t come across as real. That problem is a microcosm of the whole movie. You don’t buy most of it. It doesn’t feel convincing, plain and simple, which in turn means you never become invested. It lacks energy and layers. The opening is supposed to be a moody noir, but it wasn’t done very well.
Another thing that takes you out of it the most and made me laugh is the Mafia boss. He does a bad job selling the role. He fits more as a senior in Seinfeld, particularly in the episode “The Old Man,” where Jerry, Elaine, and George each begin visiting an elderly person. It’s hard to take it seriously.
Ray naturally ends up agreeing to help and eliminates the first two targets with ease. Ned, the ex-CIA partner, gets planted as a cop to investigate the killings. Then it’s revealed that May Munro and Ned had an agreement: He gets her into the mafia circle, and she gets Ray out in the open so he can kill him. Not a bad twist, but this is when the car speeds up and the wheels wobble increasingly. Soon after that scene, Ray has a bomb set up to kill Tomas. He goes to cancel it when he sees May with Tomas. It’s too late, and they seemingly both die. Ray is heartbroken.
Next Ray attends May’s funeral but looks into the casket and sees an old lady. She faked her death! A woman walks into the church. It’s May. They talk briefly, and he takes her by the arm and leads her out of the church. Hot on their heels is Ned. Ray and May go to a hotel, where he declares, “You shouldn’t be here, not if you want to stay alive,” but they then proceed to make love in the bed and the shower. Want to see Sly’s muscles and bare butt? and Sharon Stone naked? This is the movie for you.
I’ll quickly wrap up the ending, unlike the movie. It was another 40+ minutes between the death of Tomas and the end.
So after their “passionate event,” May leaves for her safety, but Ned has shown up. Ray escapes, but May convinces him to meet again at a lobster shack (set up by Ned so he can finally kill Ray). The lobster shack explodes, and Ray and May escape by boat and head to Ray’s place. Ned shows up along with the police, and after a struggle, Ned blows himself out of Ray’s intricately rigged home, which from the outside looks like a storage hangar. Ray and May Munro ride off in a Mustang convertible. Gloria Estefan’s song “Turn the Beat Around” plays. Give him credit, Stallone movies have great end credits scenes.
So to sum it up,
The positives: the breezy Miami setting, the first quarter to a third was passable, but that can get forgotten considering what came after.
The negatives: the last 40 minutes were bad, and as a whole, the movie just didn’t work. I didn’t get invested in the characters, and the Stallone-Stone relationship sucked, hence the raspberry award. The biggest sign that I didn’t think highly of this film is the fact that, as I was writing the recap, I struggled to remember about what I had watched just the other day. I confess that I went back and had to rewatch little segments to know precisely how the last third went down. What a mess!
This is a Stallone stinker, and yes, it is that bad.