Movie Review: Cobra

His image in the dusk she seem’d to see,
And to the silence made a gentle moan,
Spreading her perfect arms upon the air,
And on her couch low murmuring, ‘Where? O where?’
-John Keats

‘Where?’ I ask. Where indeed. Often I sit up unknowingly penetrating a waking dream faced with a question: ‘Where? O where?’ That selfsame query spoken by the Keatsian beauty, this time freckled and disjointed. The dream creature answers the damned plea:

“Why, in the curious shell of Cobra,” says the imp.

“Speak, imp, my patience runs low.”

“Look at the film in your hands,” says the imp.

“Tell me what I don’t know, not what I do – there is no film, it’s all a dirty lie.”

“Curse my truisms all you want, but that cut of cinema with ‘Cobra’ scrawled across its face is a fact,” says the imp.

“I’ll never believe it!”

“Use your eyes and not your ignorance,” says the imp.

“But the latter has jurisdiction where the former does not.”

“Glance your hands quickly,” says the imp.

“I refuse.”

“Cobra is a container of answers, free to be poked by the open-minded and clear-sighted,” says the imp.

“You imp bastard.”

And so ended the prophet’s sojourn. The sun rose on the night of dreams and brought into being a glistening spectacle: a copy of Cobra.

The where of the moment passes into the known, the instant secreting an answer to the question, a Stallonean punch to the gut of ignorance.

Where morphs into when.

When?

Now.

Listen. His words are speaking:

“In America there’s a burglary every eleven seconds, an armed robbery every sixty-five seconds, a violent crime every twenty-five seconds, a murder every twenty-four minutes, and two-hundred-and-fifty rapes a day.”

Criminological thesis or mission statement? Disinterested academic study or a pretext for shooting the balls off ne’er-do-wells? This is the monologue that opens Cobra, set to the image of a gun being lifted, pointed, and fired at the camera. The resulting bullet tells us that this is probably not a rom-com.

Cobra is not a sequel to Sssssss. Cobra is prime Sylvester Stallone action goodness. A slab of mid-'80s spectacle, cloaked in gunfire and the sheen of Commando. Stallone plays Marion Cobretti (hence why the film is not called Boa constrictor). He’s a renegade cop hunting a group of killers. His methods for law enforcement consist of using maximum force. Rather than negotiation, he prefers a boot to the throat. Immediate results are his forte, forensic attention to detail he has no time for. Police chiefs know he gets the job done but solicit his services only as a last resort, wary of the carnage he’ll leave in his wake.

Article Author: Aaron Fleming

Aaron Fleming is a waster and an idler - prone to pomposity - forever enchanted by the filmic and the sonic, words and the aesthetic - given to the most ludicrous appraisal of Culture's finest icons and compositions. He resides in London.

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