(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Rocky Balboa and John Rambo aren’t just the characters who define Sylvester Stallone: they’re the ones who’ve conspired to keep him relevant for almost half a century despite the actor and filmmaker being responsible for more terrible movies than the average Hollywood star in those intervening decades.
The story of Stallone refusing to sell the rights to Rocky unless he was granted the opportunity to play the title character is one of the industry’s most famous underdog stories, one that culminated in a ‘Best Picture’ win at the Academy Awards and a box office bonanza that catapulted him from the throes of poverty to the A-list in an instant.
The second iconic character of his career only fell into his lap because nobody else wanted to play it, with virtually every nameworthy leading man in town rejecting the chance to play the traumatised Vietnam veteran before Stallone swooped in. Even then, he thought he had a disaster on his hands until critics and audiences convinced him otherwise.
Stallone has made plenty of good films, but he’s also been in a mountain of awful ones. He was hoodwinked into Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot by rival-turned-friend Arnold Schwarzenegger, but there’s nobody else to blame for Oscar, The Specialist, Backtrace, Avenging Angelo, Driven, Assassins, D-Tox, or Judge Dredd except himself.
He might be a three-time Academy Award nominee and a Golden Globe winner, but Stallone also has 12 Razzie victories to his name from 34 nominations, including the coveted status of being named both ‘Worst Actor of the Decade’ for the 1990s and ‘Worst Actor of the Century’ for the period between 1901 and 1999. One of those nods came from a deservedly trashed film, even if the leading man is about the only person willing to defend it to the death.
Michael Caine’s 1971 crime thriller Get Carter is a classic, but it would be an understatement to say that Stallone’s 2000 crime thriller Get Carter is not. Failing to even recoup a third of its budget at the box office and falling short of achieving anything other than convincing anyone unlucky enough to see it that it was one of the worst and most pointless remakes in cinema history, it’s a low point in a filmography full of them.
Bizarrely, though, Stallone loves it. Not content with calling it “one of my BEST films” in all caps on social media to underline just how wrong he is about it, the action icon even declared it as the single most underrated, overlooked, and unfairly treated picture he’s ever made in a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter.
“Believe it or not, I think Get Carter was really underrated,” he said, which really is hard to believe because it’s shite. “That was a disappointment. I learned the hard way that remakes, even if you do it better than the original, there’s a tremendous nostalgia attached to the original.”
Surely, he can’t be suggesting that his version of Get Carter is superior to Caine’s original. If he is, then maybe Rocky took one too many blows to the head because Stallone is talking utter nonsense.
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