The movie that sent Sylvester Stallone into Hollywood exile: “I did it for me, solely”
The 1990s were a mixed bag for Sylvester Stallone, to say the least. It started on a bum note, and while there was the occasional high point, the new millennium was ushered in with his star having fallen to its lowest level since he first burst onto the scene with Rocky.
He kicked off the decade with Rocky V, which also happened to be the worst in the franchise. It was a less than graceful swansong for the ‘Italian Stallion’, and with John Rambo having also been on hiatus since 1988’s third instalment, the actor and filmmaker faced a future without his two signature characters to lean on.
Cliffhanger and Demolition Man fared well at the box office, and Cop Land featured his best performance in an eternity, but that was about as good as things got. An ill-advised detour into comedy with Oscar flopped, he was tricked into headlining the execrable Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot by Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Good Life was never even released, and between 1990 and 1999, he scored three Razzies from 12 nominations.
Incredibly, things got even worse after the millennium. Driven sank without a trace, D-Tox was delayed for years and emerged as a sorry excuse for a movie, the Get Carter remake was awful despite Stallone trying to convince people otherwise, Avenging Angelo was his first straight-to-video release ever, and things got so bad he hammed it up in multiple roles as the villain of the third Spy Kids flick in 2003.
“I did it for me, solely, my inner weird child,” he told CBS of his decision to sign on for a visual eyesore that admittedly turned a tidy profit. “At first, I thought they were making a big mistake. And then I went to my children. I said, ‘What do you think about Spy Kids?’ They started flipping out.”
It’s hard to begrudge an actor for making something their children could enjoy, but his lengthy catalogue of errors was leading Stallone straight to the bottom of the barrel. He was in serious danger of flaming out, being rendered irrelevant, and letting his past glories run out of fumes, so reinvention was required. Well, not quite reinvention, but definitely rejuvenation.
What followed was his longest-ever absence from screens. Stallone had never gone more than one calendar year without appearing in a new movie dating back to 1969, but there were 41 months between Spy Kids 3 and his next feature. Not only that, but his return came as the writer, director, and star of Rocky Balboa, which saved him from the scrap heap.
It can’t be a coincidence that Stallone’s first two films after ending his lengthiest sabbatical were new outings for Rocky and Rambo, and the one after that was another franchise-launching turn in The Expendables. He was back on the map after coming perilously close to falling off it completely, with familiarity breeding the opposite of contempt.
