The Rocky of Arm Wrestling

I have heard for years about one of Sylvester Stallone’s worst movies. Make no mistake, the actor made a bunch of stinkers back in the day. I happen to like Tango and Cash, for example, but I recognize it’s actually a pretty terrible film. Certainly no one wants to try and defend Stop or My Mom Will Shoot, a comedy Sly (supposedly) got duped into making with his action movie rival, Arnold, was (allegedly) hovering around it. But even among those notorious films, one movie still manages to stand above (or sink below, depending on how you look at it) the rest: Over the Top.

For the uninitiated, Over the Top is Stallone’s arm wrestling movie. That’s really the core of the film. Whatever else the movie might want to be about – the thrill of the open road, one trucker trying to reconnect with his son, a grandfather attempting to rule over his whole family – in the end everything gets resolved with arm wrestling. It’s like Rocky but if you swapped out boxing for a sport that is hard to film and harder to care about. The very idea sounds so stupid you have to wonder what morons thought this would be a good idea?

Well, that’s easy to answer: The Cannon Group. Cannon was notorious for making really awful films, most of which were celebrated in the category of “so bad they’re good”. You had martial arts films like Enter the Ninja and American Ninja, the naked space vampire film Lifeforce, the later Death Wish films, and then a bunch of other licenses they picked up and tried to make movies for on the cheap, like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Masters of the Universe. And in and amongst all of that, they somehow managed to lure in Sylvester Stallone, with the actor making a couple of movies under their brand, like Cobra and, of course, Over the Top. Sometimes Cannon films were successful (for a certain definition of the term), but almost invariably they were also bad. Just, sometimes, delightfully so.

Browning through films online I stumbled across Over the Top and I had to wonder if it really was just as bad as everyone said? Sure, the concept is stupid, but Sly was a decent actor that could turn in good performances (we could argue all day about if that’s still the case). He did great work on both Rocky and First Blood, so there was some hope that he could at least bring the same kind of magic to a story about a father trying to reconnect with his kid on a cross-country trip to a competitive arm wrestling match. Except that sounds awful and even with Stallone trying his best, Over the Top is absolutely irredeemable.

Stallone stars as Lincoln Hawk, a long-haul truck driver who is sent by his ex-wife, Christina (Susan Blakely), to pick up his son, Mike (David Mendenhall), from military school. Mike had never met his father before, not even realizing he had a dad that was still alive. As we learn, Lincoln left (for unspecified reason) before Mike was born, and the kid was then raised by his mom and grandfather, Jason Cutler (Robert Loggia). Because of this, their reunion does not go all that well.

Angry and bitter, Mike hates the fact that he has to travel across the country with his bio-dad. But as the miles stretch on the two slowly form a bond, with Mike slowly coming to appreciate his dad more and more. However, once they get to California to visit with Mike’s mom, who is in the hospital for heart surgery, they find out that she died on the table. Mike throws a fit, angry that he was with his dad instead of being there for his mom, and the kid goes back to his grandfather. Lincoln tries to get the kid back, gets arrested, and has to sign his rights away, leading him to leave the state and head to Las Vegas for the World Arm Wrestling Competition. But once Mike realizes he really loves his dad, all he wants to do is get to the contest so he can be there to support his hero.

Over the Top has issues, not the least of which is the fact that arm wrestling is a poor substitute for just about any other form of competitive sport they could have used instead. You can get caught up in feats of athleticism, even when you know that the outcome is preordained in a script. Watching football teams battle it out, or seeing a boxer trying to defeat his rival, can be thrilling. The action helps to suck you in and gives you something to focus on and care about. But it’s really hard to get sucked into action when all you have is two dudes staring at each other while their arms move back and forth around a fixed point.

Credit where it’s due, Stallone and the other performers try desperately to make the arm wrestling seem interesting. They flex and clench and work their arms, making faces and yelling while these feats of supposed strength are performed. But arm wrestling doesn’t have the power to suck you in like a good boxing match does. When Rocky is pummeled hard and hanging on the ropes, you feel it. In comparison, when Lincoln has a bad match he rubs his elbow joint and walks it off. It’s hardly the same thing. You don’t feel the connection.

The film also struggles to connect the arm wrestling, which one could argue is the whole central premise of the film, to the family drama. Really, Over the Top is three films stitched together into one less-than-cohesive narrative. We have Lincoln and Mike taking a cross-country drive so they can reconnect. That film then gives way to a different movie where Lincoln battles against Jason Cutler over parental rights. And then that’s cast aside so we can then do the arm wrestling competition. Each section features the same characters, but there’s so little connective tissue between them that you could pause and restart the film at certain points and feel like you’ve suddenly stepped into a different movie. It’s like a Predator script, except for a family drama and arm wrestling. Also, Predator is good and this movie sucks.

Even if we accept that the arm wrestling competition is the climax, and it’s how the film is going to resolve all its plotlines (which, if we’re being honest, it doesn’t really do and then ignores the fact that it didn’t actually resolve anything), we also have to deal with the fact that Lincoln wants Mike but Mike fucking sucks. The kid is rude, insulting, and spoiled, and never once does he become someone we want to root for. If he were a more interesting character, or if the film spent more time developing him (instead of giving us bonding montages that skip over all the actual character development) that might have helped us to care about the kid and, in return, care about the relationship between father and son.

As it stands in the movie there’s no weight to anything that happens. Mike sucks, so when he goes running off to his grandfather those of us in the audience sigh with relief. Then Lincoln does something stupid and dangerous to try and get Mike back, which lands him in jail, and it’s all obvious artifice. The whole matter is resolved as quickly as it’s raised, leading to another moment of weightless stupidity that makes you wonder why it was even in the film to begin with. All leading up to an arm wrestling match with no tension and no stakes that, despite doing nothing for the actual story, somehow resolves everything. It’s just so empty, devoid of anything compelling to build a movie around.

The best I can say for the film is that it’s stupid and cheesy. It buys in on its whole story and setting and despite how absolutely idiotic it is, that does give the film a certain level of charm. It’s a dreadful film, but from a certain perspective you can at least have some fun with it. If you got a bunch of people together to watch and heckle it, Over the Top could be a good time. But on its own, as a piece of cinema someone is expected to watch and enjoy on its own merits, this film fails. Hard.

It’s no surprise then that Over the Top was a Box Office bomb, making only $16 Mil against a $25 Mil budget. It, along with many other failures in the mid-to-late 1980s, eventually lead to Cannon passing from the hands of its then co-heads, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, so that others could try to right the ship. And while they still managed to produce some real stinkers, nothing was able to compare to the sheer audacity, and stupidity, of putting Stallone into a drama about arm wrestling. Maybe we lost something special, too, in the process…