30 years ago, Cliffhanger was another comeback for the Comeback King, Sylvester Stallone. rockmarooned looks back at the actor's 1993, one of the last times he was kinda normal:
It wouldn’t be the last time Stallone would bring himself back from the brink. But it did arguably kick off his final run of maybe-kinda-sorta normal movies. By the standards of his then-recent comedies or dead-end ’80s sequels,is a fastball straight down the middle, despite the considerable handicap of being co-written by Stallone himself.
Gabe gets an unexpected shot at redemption when he reluctantly assists on a distress call, which turns out to be a gang of thieves attempting to recover millions of dollars they’ve lost in the mountains. Chases, escapes, fights, gunfire and explosions ensue; rather than a stripped-down man-versus-nature thriller, this is very much in the vein of asequels weren’t, you know, mostly pretty bad, and if John Rambo didn’t have to overcome much in the way of psychological trauma.
It doesn’t exactly track that Stallone had been plugged into a ready-made summer blockbuster, because among its fellow summer-of-1993 hits,The Fugitive, and it’s not a special effects showcase on the level of. Stallone’s longtime rival Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t playing in the same arena this season, either; his, released a month later, aimed for families, complete with a kid hero and a PG-13 rating.
In 1993, this version of Los Angeles with gun-free cops, automated graffiti clean-up, and fines issued for swear words was taken as a clever goof on then-nascent “political correctness,” and its surprising contrast with L.A.’s hellhole rep. 30 years later, it plays a bit like a faux-libertarian’s unproduced screenplay titled something like, where all the snowflakes have frozen the world into paralysis, unable to cope when Pure Evil rears its ugly head.
That’s about where Stallone himself would wind up after the mixed ’90s track record, with a bunch of failed studio movies enabled by his twin hits in 1993. He mounted several more comebacks, but they always had a meta-narrative dimension, whether reviving Rocky Balboa in, uh,
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