"You know at a moment like this I think of my father's last words which were "Don't son, that gun is loaded!'
It is hard to write about this movie without descending (or ascending) into hyperbole. It is ironic, because that kind of praise was the reason why I avoided it for years.
I ended up watching it while home recovering from a head injury, and it was amazing. Further viewings sans head injury did not change that opinion. I am legitimately unhappy that I did not make this movie a part of my life earlier.
This movie is such a joy to me. It hits this weird sweet spot of aiming for this extremely specific version of pop machismo with absolutely no irony whatsoever.
Brian Bosworth was an incredibly popular college football player in the 1980s who bombed out once he moved up to the NFL. This movie is the reason I know vaguely who he is. While he is a bit wooden, the guy has charm, and knows how to move on-camera.
He is the perfect leading man for this movie. In any other motion picture, Bosworth would seem totally out of place. He is huge, with big muscles and the greatest mullet in all creation. In another film, Bosworth would be a joke. Or the bad guy. And not the main bad guy - he would be the bad guy who the main bad guy kills for failing to kill the hero. With Stone Cold, you have a movie that constructs a world where Bosworth can take centre-stage and it feels totally seamless.
Mostly because Stone Cold is a cartoon - and in that environment you need a cartoon character to conquer it. Our hero is an undercover cop who has to get involved with a very specific subculture with its own set of rules. The 'twist' is that our hero has worked in the subculture before and knows exactly how to work his way in. It is basically Point Break if it had been made by the cast of Roadhouse - not the actors, the characters.
A beefcake hero is only as good as his cheesecake villains, and Stone Cold does not fall down in this regard.
The villains are played by Lance Henriksen and William Forsythe. From what I have been able to gather, the movie's script was basically thrown out and re-written by the actors.
Henriksen and Forsythe are totally unleashed. If people are looking for easy caricatures of their specific acting styles, Stone Cold takes the whole cake store. What Bosworth brings in presence, they bring in ACTING.
Another thing I love about Stone Cold is how unpretentious it is about what kind of movie it is. The movie is also earnest as hell. The actors seem to know what kind of movie they're in, but there are no winks to camera or attempts to point out how ridiculous (Viking funeral!) this all is.
The movie is also filled with action, from a fun initial shootout in a supermarket to the finale, in which the biker gang take over the Mississippi capital building, riding around the building on motorcycles. It is a great time.
Directed by veteran stuntman Craig R. Baxley, Stone Cold also looks far better than it should. The action is well-staged, and Baxley's practical approach to spectacle gives some of the wilder sequences (VIKING FUNERAL!) a real punch.
And while the action is pretty solid throughout, Stone Cold's final set piece launches the movie into the stratosphere, with a massive shootout between Bosworth and the biker gang in the Mississippi Capital building, with 50% of the bikers riding around on their hogs spraying machine gunfire everywhere. It is amazing.
With its combination of ridiculous machismo (said viking funeral) and the craftsmanship that went into executing it, Stone Cold is worth a couple of viewings.
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