‘Over the Top’: Sylvester Stallone’s bizarre movie about arm wrestling
Having both risen to the very top of the A-list, the battle between Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger to establish themselves as the undisputed top dog of the action genre only became more headed as they battled for box office supremacy during the 1980s.
For every Rambo sequel, Rocky follow-up, cult favourite Cobra, or buddy cop caper Tango & Cash the former would headline, the latter would respond in kind with a Commando, a Predator, or The Running Man. They were the two biggest names shoot ’em up cinema had to offer by far, but that didn’t make either of them averse from the odd misstep.
Stallone and Schwarzenegger headlined so many hits during the decade that the failures tend to be overlooked, but one thing the ‘Austrian Oak’ has never been able to say is that he took top billing in the one and only mainstream blockbuster about an arm-wrestling truck driver with a ludicrous name.
That distinction is Sly’s and Sly’s alone, which came when he played the phenomenally-monikered Lincoln Hawk in the equally silly Over the Top. It was a flop, sure, but the 1987 slab of sweat-caked madness has since gone on to become a stone-cold cult favourite, thanks largely to being fundamentally and unequivocally stupid on virtually every imaginable level.
The plot is the sort of thing that reads as a parody through a modern lens, but was treated with the utmost seriousness in the 1980s. Stallone’s Hawk has been a deadbeat dad for a decade, and he decides to reconnect with his son right before his estranged wife dies, before he ends up being arrested and signing over custody to the boy’s grandfather.
There’s only one way to heal the fracturing bond between father and son, though, and it’s by winning the world arm-wrestling championship in Las Vegas, which comes with a lucrative prize. However, the grandfather reappears and urges Hawk even more money to fuck off permanently, which only emboldens him to emerge triumphant. It’s one of the dumbest things Stallone has ever starred in, which is saying something, but he was left disappointed that it wasn’t quite as gritty as he would have liked.
“I would have made it less glossy and set it more in an urban environment, for one,” he admitted to Ain’t It Cool. “Next, I would’ve not used a never-ending stream of rock songs but scored music instead, and most likely would’ve made the event in Vegas more ominous, not so carnival-like.” No offence, Sly, but nobody wanted an ‘ominous’ arm-wrestling tournament, and an orchestral score would have robbed the soundtrack of not only Kenny Loggins and Sammy Hagar but his own brother Frank Stallone.
Over the Top is perfectly fine for what it is, which is an unintentionally hilarious sports drama soaked to the bone with the thickest and gloopiest form of cheese on the planet. Did Stallone deserve his Golden Raspberry Award nomination for ‘Worst Actor’? No, he did not, and there’s no shortage of people willing to die on the hill that the arm-wrestling epic is sneakily one of his very best star vehicles.
