Stallone shoots for a new image in 'Cop Land'

By Laksmi Pamuntjak

JAKARTA (JP): "In Sylvester Stallone," wrote film critic Joe Queenan, "Hollywood has finally found a movie star that the public only wants to see getting his eyes gouged out and his teeth knocked loose."

Discomfiting, maybe, but the truth is not always pretty.

Hollywood has long flourished on the mauling of its male stars. Nothing sates the public's basest urges better than to see glorious faces battered, thrashed and pulverized.

Blood and the box office are still the industry's steadiest bedmates, and Stallone understands this the best. It is what made him an icon.

But when he appears in Cop Land, meek, slow-witted, and 38 pounds overweight, diehard Rambo fans may see it as the slumbering death of a Hollywood genre.

In place of the sexy, muscle-bound, testosterone-filled Stallone they love, hunkers a paunchy misfit stuck on the wrong side of the George Washington Bridge.

Worse still, he is hemmed in by a cast which reads like the Who's Who of character acting: Robert de Niro, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta. What is Stallone trying to prove?

The answer -- as befits a man of few words -- is simple. Fifty-year-old Sylvester Stallone has decided to take up acting. And why not?

The box-office death of The Specialist and Judge Dredd has sent his career to doomsville. And, while there is still a lot of charm in those curly lips, he is not getting any younger.

It was Bruce Willis who paved the way: Action career in the doldrums, then a bid for respectability.

Enter Stallone as Freddy Heflin, a simpleton doomed to live out his life as an ineffectual sheriff in a town populated with corrupt NYPD cops.

Built on mafia money, the town is controlled by Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel) and his cronies, whose involvement in illegal dealings mean they will stop at nothing -- even murder -- to keep the authorities at bay.

Freddy sees but does not see, preferring to maintain the status quo through misguided camaraderie.

Barred from joining the force due to his impaired hearing, he is resigned to playing fairy godmother to his unrequited love (the bland Annabella Sciorra) and gazing forlornly at the candied silhouette of the Big Apple. He hangs around the big boys, but nobody ever pays him much attention.

Everything is hunky-dory for the rogue cops until one of their own (Michael Rappaport) commits a recklessly act which threatens to expose their mob connection.

Rather belatedly, Freddy gets a shot of morality and decides to bring them in.

"It's taken me a while to come around," he admits to pesky Internal Affairs investigator Moe Tilden (de Niro), but come around he does, in a shambling way that, alas, does not obscure Stallone's adherence to his time-tested mantra: blood sells.

Tough job

But what makes director-screenwriter James Mangold's job tougher is not bloated star egos or inflated star paychecks (most of the actors have consented to bargain basement wages). It is taking up potentially brilliant material and relying on Sylvester Stallone to be the connecting thread.

The junk-grit realism is certainly there, and so is the level of performance that we expect from such an accomplished cast. Stallone himself has never been so appealing.

However, his approach to his new persona is typically physical (as if putting on weight adds gravity to his acting), there is something sweet and innocent in the way he plays up that heavy- lidded gaze, that drowsy half-smile.

His bumbling gullibility is believable because intelligence has never been high on Stallone's chart.

But his real triumph lies in transforming an action icon into a low-key, sympathetic underdog.

Yet, on the whole, the film ultimately proves too ambitious for Mangold.

He is trapped in a vortex. On the one hand, he has a brand new Sylvester Stallone to project, on the other he has some of the best actors of our generation huddled together on the periphery, screaming for screen time.

There is nothing wrong for a movie to rest on one real character but, impressive as he is, Stallone is not seasoned enough to single-handedly carry an entire drama.

At times, his great leap forward from stupor to resolve feels hollow and artificial: Where is the inner conflict?

De Niro and Keitel are given only one scene of resonance: two veterans in their elements, testing each other's limits with a few, subtle lines. But their roles remain so one-dimensional that neither actor ever rises above it.

De Niro plays his hot-tempered detective like any hot-tempered movie detective, Keitel plays his crusty patriarch like any crusty movie patriarch.

It is also clear that Peter Berg, Robert Patrick and Michael Rappaport are trying hard to be the next Goodfellas, all jagged edges and a lot of attitude, but they are hardly on screen enough to matter.

Ray Liotta (as former insider Gary Figgis) occasionally bobs to the surface with a burst of interesting polemic, but it is ultimately another stock Ray Liotta performance: piercing wild eyes, eerie smile and overcooked angst.

Mangold is also no Scorcese. Although he has a flair for dialogue, he does not have much visual logic or imagination.

Cop Land could have spoken volumes about its classic subject matter but, instead, it merely skirts around the edges of crucial issues (such as identity and relationships) only to pull off yet another Rambo for the finale.

If Mangold's quest is for a gritty urban fable in the tradition of Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorcese, his feat is ultimately confined to aiding Sylvester Stallone do a "Bruce Willis" to his flagging action career.