CULTURE I FILM
‘Cop Land’ — The Common Hero Sylvester Stallone Never Wanted to Be
How the powerhouse urban western put Sly back in the game.
After Rambo, First Blood, Sylvester Stallone was always trying to be this big, masculine hero on the screen. In the 80s and 90s, he was more of an athlete than an actor, representing a one-man army, tough and resourceful, unable to die by mortal human hands.
The characters he played were archetypes of the modern white action man. He was cooler than a Russian fridge, walking away from explosions in slow motion. He had a clenched fist in his chest instead of a heart. The only man who could overshadow his success was the Austrian muscle-mountain, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But just as most of his contemporaries, Sly burned out, too. In the second half of the 90s, blown-up muscles and riskless gunfights didn’t sell that well anymore. He was shifting into B movies, making a cartoon of himself by signing bad contracts for way too many crap films.
In 2019, he reflected on those missteps in an interview in Cannes. He explained that those movies seemed like good deals at the time, but he relied heavily on his agent to get them. He booked projects sometimes years in advance. “As an actor, I was put on auto-pilot. And before…
