4b. Rocky
Sylvester Stallone is a guilty pleasure. Just about every movie he has ever made qualifies. Its not that he makes purely bad films; Sly just has an imagination and cinematic sensibility too big for conventional stories. So of course he cant just have one franchise in the top five; Rocky and Rambo both deserve recognition. Dont let the Academy Award for Best Picture deceive you. The Rocky series is anything but cinematic royalty. Its a basic rags-to-riches story with some great moments, but not much more. Taxi Driver or Network or All the Presidents Men should have won that year, but something was in the water that year and Rocky won (if you need more evidence check out
Roger Eberts review where he calls Sylvester Stallone a Young Marlon Brando.). These films are quintessential 70s and 80s schlock. Each film finds a way to top the last ones montage cheesy montage; the ultimate sequence being Rockys hilarious training sequence in the middle of a frigid Soviet village (pushing horses, walking through snow, and sawing logs) being mixed with Dolph Lundgren in the high tech Russian lab (lifting weights, working on menacing machines, and using liberal amounts of red lighting). Lines from
Lundgren,
Mr. T, and
Sly himself are the kinds of quotable moments that make the great guilty pleasures resonate with us for our whole lives. Still, Rocky gets put a notch below Rambo for its inability to maintain the awesomely bad brand. Stallone managed to pull it off four times in a row, but the fifth film in the franchise is patently unwatchable, and his recent effort was a boring disappointment.