By Geno McGahee
In 1985, ROCKY IV was released and was a smash hit, making over 300 million in just the United States. It gave Sylvester Stallone a lot of power as a money draw and allowed him more control. He would write and star in the 1986 film “COBRA”, which did fairly well in the states, bringing home 160 million in the US and followed up with OVER THE TOP, which bombed. He wrote and starred in the arm-wrestling action film and proved that Stallone’s ego was getting a bit too big. Actually, his ego has been growing at a quick rate for a long time.
So, he was “Cobra” in COBRA and is now “Hawk” in OVER THE TOP. I won’t argue here. It sounds cool. I don’t have a cool name. I wish I was named Cobra. Maybe I would be tougher and wear nicer sunglasses and a leather jacket.
Hawk is a trucker that smiles when he drives. I found it strange that he just drives around with a big fucking smile on his face. When he shows up at the military school to pick up his son, Mike (David Mendenhall), he is met by security telling him that “deliveries in the back of the school.” They hired a real fucktard to do security. Hawk didn’t even have a trailer. What the fuck was he delivering? Hawk told him that he was picking up his son, but he should have said “do you see a fucking trailer you minimum wage rent-a-cop?” Maybe that would have made Hawk unlikable, but I would have liked him better.
Hawk has been out of his son’s life for a long time and wants back in, but Mike is an asshole from moment one. He’s just one of those pricks that you want to punch in the face. He was raised by his grandfather, Jason (Robert Loggia) and I have a hard time that he raised him to be such a prick. It can’t be. Maybe he just spoiled him so terribly that he’s turned into this jerk off. I don’t know. I just think that Robert Loggia is incapable of doing wrong.
On the road, Mike and Hawk aren’t clicking so well. Hawk introduces him into his world, which includes arm wrestling for money. He brings him to a diner, where Mike reprimands Hawk again for eating what he disapproves of. That’s when we meet The Smasher (Magic Schwarz), a rough guy with a mullet and a crowd of supporters. He demands an arm-wrestling match with Hawk and a man screams “tell him Smasher!” That’d be me. I want to know a guy named “Smasher” so I can yell “tell him Smasher” as he challenges somebody to some sort of manly thing like arm-wrestling.
Hawk and son start doing some very unsafe things. While driving, Hawk lifts weights with his right hand, which he’d get fucked for now with that hands free thing. He then lets Mike drive the truck and he’s all over the road. He could have killed somebody. They then sleep in the truck and the truck doesn’t have a sleeper. “Truckers do this,” Hawk notes, regarding sleeping in the truck, but the dumbass doesn’t realize that they do it with a sleeper. If Hawk is trying to make a good impression with Mike, he’s failing.
To make matters worse, Hawk challenges a bunch of young boys to an arm-wrestling contest, putting his son on the spot. When Mike loses the first out of three falls, he runs away and gives us such bad acting that it makes Stallone look like he can act. He talks Mike into finishing the match and he wins, turning Mike’s baseball hat backwards which is supposed to be going into some other tough guy zone. It’s absurd.
We learn that this entire setup was put into place by Mike’s sickly mother, Christina (Susan Blakely), which is messed up. He’s been out of Mike’s life forever while the grandfather has been there from day one. I don’t know why she would hook her only son up with some arm-wrestling, non-child support-paying meathead.
Jason sets up the kidnapping of his grandson with a bunch of goons and almost gets him killed. Maybe Mike belongs in foster care. The kidnapping thing was Stallone’s attempt to inject action into the film, since that’s what he’s known for. It doesn’t make any sense. Jason is fighting with his lawyers to keep his grandson, and, for some reason, hires goons to kidnap him and bring him back to the exact place where Hawk would find him. Wouldn’t that hurt his chances in court? I would think that setting up a kidnapping would give the judge a reason not to allow him custody of Mike.
Christina drops dead and we get more terrible acting from Mike. The fucking emotional scenes with him are unbearable. They add more of it at Christina’s funeral. The more I got into this film, the more I was surprised that it got green lit. I know Stallone was printing money, but I’m betting that somebody in the company said “It’s fucking arm wrestling people with a whiney kid. It’s gonna bomb!”
When Mike decides to go back to the only father figure he knows and leaves Hawk, things get messy. Hawk drives his tractor through the metal fence at the grandfather’s place, smashing up some cars, a fountain, and the front of the house. Hawk is an idiot. At this point, the only thing that would make sense would be for Hawk to kill the grandfather and take Mike or kill the grandfather and then kill himself to make Mike feel guilty for the rest of his life for leaving him there. The insane behavior didn’t have the crazy ending that I had hoped for, but we did get more fucking crying from Mike. I would have given him away to Hawk in two seconds if I was the grandfather.
Hawk gets locked up and is given a deal to get out of all of the property damage. He agrees and sells his truck to get money to bet on himself for an arm-wrestling competition. Meanwhile, Mike is going through everything and finds a bunch of letters to him from Hawk, which his grandfather apparently hid. Mixed in were letters to Christina. Did the grandfather hide those too or was she the one hiding the letters? This discovery prompts him to steal a truck and drive to the competition to support his dad.
At the competition, Bob “Bull” Hurley (Rick Zumwalt) is the bad guy that Hawk must beat. A lard ass trucker is a far cry from Ivan Drago. Also, the place is packed with fans. Who the fuck would pay to see arm wrestling? I don’t understand Nascar or Baseball or Tennis either, but they seem less fucking stupid than arm wrestling.
I don’t know anyone that arm-wrestles, but all the participants are fucked up. They all come out screaming like idiots. It’s so insane. Hawk is the only reserved one there, which is probably by design, but it’s just an odd scene. I bet this is one of those white trash events. I have a lot of white trash in my family, but none of them have money to go to events, which is why I don’t know about this. I bet it’s just like those junior beauty pageants, tractor pulls and rodeos. Arm-wrestling must appeal to hillbillies.
Jason tries one last time to buy off Hawk, but his approach sucks. He spends five minutes insulting Hawk before offering him a tractor/trailer along with a check for 500k. When Hawk refuses, Jason starts yelling “you’re a loser. You’ve always been a loser!” He really needs to work on that approach.
So, Hawk wins the arm wrestling tournament beating the unbeatable Bull Hurley. So, that’s the payoff after sitting through this film? The arm wrestling scenes with sweaty dudes screaming and shaking aren’t really dramatic or exciting. They are just silly.
OVER THE TOP is a mess with terrible acting, a terrible premise, poorly written, nonsensical and without payoff. I would say it’s one of Stallone’s worst, but he’s got so many bad ones, I hesitate to say it.
