Cobra
By Peter John Gardner
Little known fact that I swear I'm not making up for the sake of this article: one of my dream jobs as a child was a cop. Any kind of law enforcement interested me as a kid whether it is a detective or member of the SWAT team. Bottom line, I wanted to bust some dirt bags and bring peace and justice to society. My friends and I would gather our Super Soaker water guns and have neighborhood gang wars with two teams as the inner city (well, suburban Texas) gangs, while a core group of three or four would be the cops. I always wanted to be on the cops’ team.
Another dream job of mine when I was a kid (and I still have the 1st grade essay to prove it) was to be a garbage man. Only because I wanted to ride on the back of the truck every morning. Ambitious young lad I was.
Movies like "Cobra" fed into my understanding that being a cop would be an awesome job. The life of a cop was the life of a badass; one that plays by his own rules, carries automatic weapons, tells bad guys awesome lines like, “You’re the disease, and I'm the cure," and fuck Brigitte Nielsen before Flava Flav brought the noise on her.
"Cobra" is every 80s action movie cliché you can think of. Stallone is the badass cop (his license plate even reads AWSME 50); Brigitte Nielsen is the damsel in distress that knows too much. There are murders going on around the city. The cops think it's the work of one man; Cobra knows otherwise and takes matters into his own hands. Stallone and Brigitte get busy with the fizzy. Cobra blows shit up with complete disregard for the paperwork and legal issues that would ensue. You know the drill. You've seen this movie before even if you haven't.
That being said, the world needs movies like this. It's escapist fare, pure and simple, and there will always be a market for movies like this. Society will always have the people that come home from a shitty day at work or school and be taken into a world where renegade cops are the heroes and car chases and explosions are aplenty. Sometimes a person just isn't in the mood for Bergman or Herzog. We have to celebrate the bad movies for they take us to a place where everything is just a tad cooler, even if it's just for ninety minutes, and that little kid inside of you is tickled by the thought that you could've been a cop that doesn't take shit from anyone, like Cobra.
And then you have assholes like me that try to extrapolate these films and find meaning where there is none.
