OVP: Cliffhanger (1993)

Film: Cliffhanger (1993)

Stars: Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, Michael Rooker, Janine Turner, Rex Linn, Paul Winfield

Director: Renny Harlin

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Visual Effects, Sound, Sound Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sylvester Stallone: click here to learn more about Mr. Stallone (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I don't mean to compare Stallone's career all month to Schwarzenegger's, but it's hard not to both because that's what the press did during their entire heyday and it's also hard when you look into the 1990's as they were on deeply different paths.  By the late 1980's, Schwarzenegger was regularly churning out hits in films like Predator, but the best was still to come.  For Stallone...the 1990's were a series of pitfalls.  It started with Rocky V, which made money but given the expectations after the last four films, was a disappointment.  But this would arguably be a high-point when you look at what would come next.  While Arnold was making mountains of money with Total Recall, Terminator 2, and True Lies (all films audiences adored), Stallone was working in truly crappy flicks like Oscar, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, and Judge Dredd.  Even his films that made money, like The Specialist or Daylight, were critically-lambasted and were largely only popular overseas.  Stallone at this point was to the Razzie Awards what Meryl Streep was to the Oscars (fun fact-Stallone gave Meryl her Oscar for Sophie's Choice).

(Spoilers Ahead) The one really bright spot from the first half of the decade for Stallone was in 1993.  Cliffhanger is not a critically-acclaimed film by any means (and Stallone got nominated for Worst Screenplay at the Razzies), but it had decent reviews, and made a fortune.  One could argue it was the last unequivocally successful blockbuster built off of Stallone as a leading man.  The movie is about Gabe Walker (Stallone), a mountain rescue ranger who is traumatized by his friend Hal's (Rooker) girlfriend dying in the opening moments of the film from an accident while ziplining through the Colorado Rockies.  Walker largely checks out of his life and wants to leave it behind, taking his girlfriend Jessie (Turner) with him, but she refuses.  Meanwhile, a group of hijackers, headed by Eric Qualen (Lithgow) steal a fortune of $100 million aboard a US Treasury plane, but a mishap in the hijacking causes them to crash in the Rockies.  After tricking Hal, Jessie, & Gabe into rescuing them, this causes an increasingly staggering standoff, as Hal, Gabe, & Jessie try to stay alive as these people attempt to escape with all of the money.

Cliffhanger is a movie that is, and I say this lovingly, dumb as a post.  The plot of the film rarely makes sense beyond a second grader's description of an action film, and it is impossibly repetitive.  We have the same standoffs between Stallone, Lithgow, Rooker, and Rex Linn for about 60 minutes in a row.  But that shouldn't confuse with it a bad movie, as Cliffhanger is not a bad movie.

For starters, some of the action scenes are really well done.  The opening scene with Stallone desperately trying to save a doomed Michelle Joyner from falling to her death thousands of feet below is nerve-gripping...I was actively clutching a pillow wondering what would happen.  And the film as it progresses lives up to some of the camp of its premise, mostly because John Lithgow (with an accent that kind of has to be heard to be believed) acting as over-the-top as is humanly possible to keep the audience amused between Stallone getting different elaborate killing scenes in.  This is, like many of Stallone's films, a clear paycheck role for a decent actor who regularly was selling out...but that doesn't negate that it works more than it doesn't, and Stallone's everyman appeal is there, especially in the first half.

First Blood (1982)

Film: First Blood (1982)

Stars: Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy

Director: Ted Kotcheff

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sylvester Stallone: click here to learn more about Mr. Stallone (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last month we talked about Arnold Schwarzenegger, and this month with us approaching Sylvester Stallone, it's important to talk about them in conjunction.  While I could've picked an actual film they made together (the minor 2013 hit Escape Plan probably made the most sense) to frame this, it actually makes more sense in terms of a film from the 1980's when the feud was actually waging.  First Blood and the Rambo franchise really launched Sylvester Stallone away from some of the risks he was taking post-Rocky with films like Paradise Alley, Escape to Victory and Rhinestone (these films scripts might have also helped deter Stallone), but it also made him a quintessential action star of the 1980's.  The other quintessential action star of the 1980's was Schwarzenegger, and younger audiences might now know how intense their rivalry was.

Amongst other things that they did during the roughly 10-year stretch that the two would feud was Stallone marrying Schwarzenegger's ex-girlfriend (Brigitte Nielsen), and they would take a series of jabs at each other in movies like Twins, Tango & Cash, and Last Action Hero.  It's not clear, in retrospect how much of this was the press feeding into things (by all accounts Arnold's relationship with Nielsen was a momentary fling, and all of the jokes in those movies are clearly said as fourth well-breaking jest for the audience to chuckle at), but it's worth noting that Stallone seemed to take it more seriously than Schwarzenegger, purportedly helping to fund the legal fees of a reporter who had called Schwarzenegger's father a Nazi (which he was, though rumors about him committing war crimes or being involved in carrying out the Holocaust have long circulated but never been proven, and are likely untrue), probably the biggest escalation in the feud (and one Stallone initially did behind-the-scenes).

Why am I picking First Blood to be the movie we discuss the Arnold/Sly feud?  Because it probably wouldn't have been possible without First Blood.  Sly Stallone's career was made with Rocky, but while the film piled on successful sequels, most of the other movies that Stallone was making at the time were flops.  All of the movies I listed above didn't succeed, and while Nighthawks turned a profit, it wasn't enough to really notice in the way the Rocky films did.  The one bonafide box office performance during this time he turned in was Staying Alive, which made a fortune...but was only directed by Stallone, and instead it was John Travolta who got the box office credit for it.  Were it not for Rambo, it's arguable that Stallone would've spent the 1980's making movies like Chuck Norris & Charles Bronson did-middling, lucrative but barely registering straight-to-video style pictures that no one would remember.  But he did make First Blood, and it changed the trajectory of his career, making him a theatrical movie star for at least another decade.

(Spoilers Ahead) First Blood is the story of John Rambo (Stallone), a Vietnam war veteran who is basically a drifter, coming into town in a small city in Washington, and being chased out of town for not being "the right sort."  Rambo doesn't take this lying down, and gets into a war of wills with Will Teasle (Dennehy), a sheriff who abuses Rambo, and causes him to have flashbacks to Vietnam.  During the PTSD, he escapes, and essentially sets off a series of attacks that result in the deaths of multiple police officers, initially unintentionally, but eventually very intentionally.  They even bring in Rambo's supervising officer in the army Colonel Sam Trautman (Crenna) to try and deal with Rambo as the showdown escalates, and we see that only one man between Rambo and Teasle will survive...

...except both of them do.  In an interesting scene toward the end involving Stallone, Dennehy, & Crenna, we see Stallone admit that he felt confused by the public rejection of his service after Vietnam.  First Blood is really interesting as a cultural artifact because it represents (at the rise of the Reagan Era) a nail-in-the-coffin of the hippie liberalism that had existed in the late 1960's.  Read any discussion about the treatment of Vietnam veterans returning from the war (that they were spat upon and called "baby killers") and you'll find a host of different anecdotal and academic evidence online, the former insisting that it was relatively common while the latter pointing out that it was rare to the point of providing virtually no persistent evidence in terms of things like video or police records.  That all three of these men come together for Stallone's John Rambo to soliloquize about this treatment becomes a sort of fascinating case study of your political beliefs-conservatives see in John Rambo a fighter, someone who was rejected after he did his service to his country by anti-war protesters, while liberals see a man broken by a war who is still rejected by authority figures (it should not be lost on anyone that the men both terrorizing & supporting Rambo are leaders in a law & order organization, a longtime bastion of conservative reverance).  Stallone's sort of two-dimensional approach to the character, as just a "guy who is living his life" helps tremendously here-it makes you think First Blood is about what you want, and fighting against the other guy, while they see it the same way.  In terms of propaganda, it's honestly really impressive, and adding in the early scenes which have a John Boorman directing Deliverance vibe, it's a much better movie than you'd expect.

But First Blood's complicated politics did not continue in the very successful film sequels that would basically just make Rambo another Terminator (Bruce Willis would have this same issue with the Die Hard movies).  The next three films would all make north of $100M at the box office, and would become Stallone's life-blood as a bankable star along with Rocky.  But unlike Schwarzenegger, Stallone (despite, for my money, being the better actor) didn't have good enough taste in his scripts and cared too much about his paychecks to really win the war against Arnold.  It helped that Schwarzenegger had the good luck to find a proper talent (James Cameron) to make his two best films, but it's more than that-Schwarzenegger had better quality control (he actually said no to sequels when they didn't make sense), and ultimately came out on top.  Even Stallone would later admit (years later, when the two had become friends offscreen) "He wanted to be number one.  Unfortunately he got there."  We'll talk about why Stallone & Schwarzenegger fell off next week. and how both of their careers would change in the 1990's.

Rocky II (1979)

Film: Rocky II (1979)

Stars: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Burgess Meredith

Director: Sylvester Stallone

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sylvester Stallone: click here to learn more about Mr. Stallone (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Sylvester Stallone's early life & career are interesting enough that they're literally releasing a biopic about it in the next year.  Born the son of an astrologer and hairdresser (both of whom, if their later outbursts on talk shows & reality television appearances were any indication, were probably not the most fit parents you could imagine), he grew up in a working class background.  Due to a mistake during his birth, he was left with some paralysis on his lower face, meaning that he consistently looked like he was grimacing, which he was mocked for in school.  This would've probably deterred most young people, but Stallone dreamed of being an actor & director, and so he headed to Hollywood.

Stallone's early years in Hollywood are honestly pretty bleak.  He struggled to find work, and at one point has admitted that he literally was homeless, sleeping in bus stations.  He got work in a softcore pornography film (you read that right) called The Party at Kitty and Stud's (Stallone would play Stud), and pursued extra work, eventually getting some in MASH, Bananas, & What's Up Doc?.  Stallone's big break happened through his own hard work-he wrote a script for the film Rocky, with the intention of him playing the lead part given Hollywood was not giving him these kinds of roles.  The film got the attention of producers Irwin Winkler & Robert Chartoff, who were making a name for themselves at the time by producing crime & action pictures starring established leading men like James Caan & Charles Bronson.  Stallone refused to sell the script, even with an offer of over $350k (over $2 million today) and the recent memory of homelessness on the line, unless they let him star in the film.  The producers relented (eventually having to cut the budget without someone like Robert Redford or Burt Reynolds as box office insurance), but Stallone's gambit paid off.  The film made over $200 million, and was not just the highest-grossing film of 1976, but (after Star Wars) out-earned every other film from 1977 the following year.  The movie would win the Best Picture Oscar, and Stallone would get nominations for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay (ultimately losing both to Network).  Just a few years after sleeping in bus depots, Sly was now one of the biggest names in Hollywood.

(Spoilers Ahead) I have seen Rocky many times because my parents had cable in the 90's, and to be fair, I've probably seen chunks of all of the first five Rocky movise thanks to the marathons TV stations would run of it during this era ad nauseum, but I believe this is the first time I've ever sat down and truly watched Rocky II cover-to-cover.  The film takes place immediately after the events of the previous film, when Apollo Creed (Weathers) has just defeated Rocky Balboa (Stallone) in a tight contest, which has put a chink into Creed's armor even if he lost (given Rocky came out of nowhere).  The film starts with Creed demanding a rematch, but given that Rocky has promised Adrian (Shire) he won't fight anymore, he won't give into one.  But the film shows the pitfalls in one's 15 minutes of fame, and after a while Rocky can't get a job, and is broke with a kid on the way.  He realizes that the only way that he's ever going to provide the kind of life he wants for his newborn son and young wife is to fight, even if it's putting his life at risk due to injuries from the first film.  Rocky begins training again with Mickey (Meredith), and in a climactic final scene, does what he couldn't do in the first film-he wins, defeating the heavyweight champion of the world (and thus becoming it himself).

Rocky II, here directed & written by Stallone himself (something that he would do throughout his career with other films-Stallone directed more of his own movies than he gets credit for in conversations about his work), is not Rocky, and it's not nearly as well-regarded as some of the other follow-ups in the series.  Part of that problem is because the film itself is not well-made, being too repetitive of problems from the first film, and too ridiculous about trying to convince the audience that the fight (and the redemption from it) won't result in Rocky defeating Apollo Creed.  Stallone, as we'll find this month, is a more talented actor than Schwarzenegger was last month (it helps that English is his first language), though not as versatile as, say, Sean Connery.  There's a naturalism to his Rocky that almost makes it feel like he's playing himself, which isn't really fair given he'd play against this type repeatedly, including in our movie next week.  But the script here is too paint-by-numbers, and it takes too long to get to the (thrilling) final scene.

Saturdays with the Stars: Sylvester Stallone

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man who dominated the box office throughout the 1980's with violent, explosion-heavy action thrillers.  This month, we're going to talk about a man who, if you were alive during Arnold's heyday, you pretty much always referenced him with.  While not as successful (something he would later admit), there was a time these future friends would have a combative, sometimes shockingly so, relationship in the press, which would be good for both of their careers, but would, for this star, feel like a step down to the type of roles he once felt capable of playing.  This month's star is Sylvester Stallone.

Stallone's early childhood honestly reads like one of his movie's, with his mother being a famed wrestling promoter (and astrologist) and his father Frank a hairdresser.  During delivery, Stallone had to be removed from his mother with forceps, which pinched a nerve that would cause the lower side of his face to be seen in a snarl, something that would become the actor's signature look in years that followed, and caused him to have a ready-made tough guy aesthetic.  Stallone, unlike Schwarzenegger, was a fairly good student, briefly attending Notre Dame, before he started to work in movies as an actor.

Stallone's early career is famous to anyone who read tabloid newspapers, but he appeared in a soft-core porn film called The Party at Kitty and Stud's (later titled Italian Stallion, capitalizing on Stallone's famous nickname), and got extra work in movies like MASH, Bananas, and Klute before writing himself the role that would make him a legend, as Rocky Balboa.  In the 15 years that followed, Stallone would become a household name, associated with both Rocky and Rambo, as well as occasional forays outside of the action hero ring that weren't nearly as successful.

Stallone today is not a particularly well-regarded actor, in many ways reducing his talent (he is, lest we forget, a two-time Oscar-nominated actor, something that Schwarzenegger never came close to achieving) to an asterisk compared to a series of crap (and political choices like endorsing Donald Trump) that would make him unpalatable to a new generation of moviegoers.  This month we're not going to ignore the unsavory aspects of Stallone's celebrity, but we're also going to look at what might be neglected in his filmography, with me seeing one of his most critically-acclaimed roles, as well as watching a Rocky film I've never caught before, and somehow introducing myself to John Rambo for the first time.

OVP: True Lies (1994)

Film: True Lies (1994)

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, Art Malik, Tia Carrere, Eliza Dushku, Charlton Heston

Director: James Cameron

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Arnold Schwarzenegger: click here to learn more about Mr. Schwarzenegger (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Today we're going to talk about a film that was made at the peak of Arnold Schwarzenegger's career, and arguably (definitely after Terminator 2) one of his best films.  But the 1997 release of Batman & Robin, a movie considered so bad at the time that it seemed like it might end the Batman movies (side note: young, gay John loved this movie, mostly because of Chris O'Donnell) seemed to cause a different chapter in Arnold's largely teflon career.  End of Days barely turned a profit (only making that because it did so well overseas but tanked domestically), and The 6th Day was a financial disaster, and called into question Schwarzenegger's then exorbitant salary of $25 million per picture.  Followed by Collateral Damage (which also tanked), not even the solid box office of Terminator 3 could've really saved what seemed unthinkable-after twenty years of record box office, Arnold Schwarzenegger's career as a bankable movie star was coming to an end.

But here's where Schwarzenegger had a career second act as a movie star that only Ronald Reagan & Hedy Lamarr could really top: he went into politics (me now shifting to the other side of this blog to tell this story).  In 2003, California Gov. Grey Davis was wildly unpopular.  He had won reelection in 2002 by only 5-points, and hadn't reached 50% due to the strength of a Green Party candidate.  For all of the talk about Claire McCaskill largely inventing the "help elect the worst opponent in the opposite party's primary technique" that is still used today (just look at Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan), Grey Davis used it in 2002, running ads calling Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan "too moderate" to take advantage of the newly closed primaries for the GOP.  Riordan was seen as a moderate, and would've beaten Davis, but against businessman Bill Simon (son of President Ford's Treasury Secretary William E. Simon) Davis was able to win based off of the (at that point) relatively blue California electorate (the state got bluer in the next two decades).  But California's recall laws were relatively easy to push, and Schwarzenegger was the kind of candidate (flashy, moderate, and likable) that the GOP couldn't pull off in 2002.  Against Davis, who was mired in controversy thanks to raising auto fees in the state and a huge budget spurred by the dot-com bust that hit California especially hard, someone like Schwarzenegger who could announce his run on The Tonight Show with millions of Americans watching in awe, Arnold was unstoppable.  He would be elected Governor and serve as a (relatively...until the latter half of his second term, which happens to most governors) popular incumbent who could still win in 2006 as a Republican even though it was a blue wave.

(Spoilers Ahead) What does this have to do with True Lies?  Honestly, nothing, but I chose the film because I didn't want to watch The 6th Day or End of Days because they're famously terrible (and because I've not only seen Terminator 3 already, I saw it before I saw the first two movies in the franchise on a weekend where I otherwise spent time ordering pizza & beer while playing Grand Theft Auto with my cousin's boyfriend...the closest I may have ever come to successfully being a straight man), and then Arnold really didn't work in movies when he was governor.  So we're going to end our month with him on the high-note of True Lies, a really fun film about Harry (Schwarzenegger) who lives a conventional, in some ways autopilot life with his wife Helen (Curtis).  She thinks he's a computer hardware salesman (despite him looking like, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger), but he's actually a top agent for a counterterrorism unit.  When Harry suspects Helen of having an affair with a man named Simon (Paxton), he tracks her down, realizing Simon is pulling the opposite con (he poses as a spy but is actually a used car salesman), and he instead tricks her into doing a "job"...but then she gets pulled into the actual job that he's doing when Juno Skinner (Carrere), a terrorist organization leader, kidnaps them both.

True Lies is obviously a big, flashy action movie (and it looks good, this is James Cameron we're talking about-the man can't make a bad-looking picture), but it gets its flair from being a comedy first, and an action movie second.  This is probably the only true comedy that James Cameron has ever made, but he's quite adept at it, and has the good sense to hire a gifted comedic actress in Jamie Lee Curtis as his lead.  She does a wonderful job opposite Arnold (not a gifted comedian, and while fine, seemingly bad by comparison because Curtis is outacting him so well) totally selling this bored, sexually-frustrated housewife just wanting some adventure & attention in her marriage.  There are moments toward the middle where you actually feel her pain, that she really might leave him and touch the third rail of a comedy by having an actual affair, and Curtis plays it organically in a movie of heightened reality.  She would get Golden Globe & SAG nominations that year, and given the dearth of strong lead actress performances, probably was close to getting her first Oscar nomination decades before Everything Everywhere All at Once had there not been some category confusion over where to put her (she's a lead for the record, for whenever we get to the 1994 OVP).

Schwarzenegger returned to acting after his time as governor, but by 2011 the movie star landscape had changed, and the glowing world of the 1990's where they ran Hollywood like deities had evaporated into a world of comic books and intellectual property.  He would find himself largely just doing work in established franchises like Terminator and The Expendables.  His attempts at original films either missed expectations (Escape Plan) or basically no one saw (Sabotage, Maggie).  By the 2020's, Schwarzenegger's acting career, once big enough to demand the largest salary in Hollywood, had been reduced to making a comedy series for Netflix that got cancelled after two seasons.

Next month, we're going to talk about an actor whose career has been inextricably linked to Schwarzenegger's despite them not working together during their initial heyday.  But to link the two is to compare the two, and depending on your approach...it's hard to tell which one ends out the champ.

OVP: Total Recall (1990)

Film: Total Recall (1990)

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Michale Ironside, Ronny Cox

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best sound, Sound Effects Editing, Visual Effects*...I didn't make a mistake there, the statue for Visual Effects was technically an honorary statue, the last time to date a film has had that happen rather than nominating Visual Effects contenders for a competitive field)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Arnold Schwarzenegger: click here to learn more about Mr. Schwarzenegger (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I said last week, Schwarzenegger's career is too big to fit into one month, and honestly the films he made only play so much of a part.  Schwarzenegger, in a lot of ways like figures such as Marilyn Monroe & James Dean, ended up being an outsized icon, bigger as a celebrity idea than his actual films.  You see that in the 1990's.  We start out with Total Recall, a film that made a huge impact (it was in the Top 10 finishes of the year, above Die Hard 2 with his competitor Bruce Willis), but his successes were not as consistent in the 1990's, as the type of action-hero flick that had made him a superstar in the 1980's began to go out of vogue (this wasn't just true for Schwarzenegger-men like Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude van Damne also suffered a similar fate as the decade would continue).  For every True Lies there seemed to be a Last Action Hero or End of Days.  Schwarzenegger was helped, pretty dramatically, by international box office, justifying his gigantic paydays against increasingly lousy domestic grosses because he made so much overseas, particularly in a growing Asian market, and he always had the Terminator to fall back on, but it's worth noting as we head into our last week of Arnold next Saturday, by the time a different type of opportunity rolled around in 2003, he was in a position very different than someone like Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise (who had diversified their standing in the 1990's with other genres, something that, kindly, Schwarzenegger probably didn't have the range to pull off), and was ready for a new challenge.

(Spoilers Ahead) But let's back up and talk about Total Recall, one of the movies that is most-remembered from Arnold in the 1990's, and maybe one of his most interesting performances?  The film is about a world where there are literally people living on other planets, specifically Mars (though apparently also, defying all laws of physics, humans can also inhabit Saturn now), and Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) is a construction worker who wants to see Mars, because he keeps having bizarre dreams about a brunette woman there.  He eventually goes to a place that simulates a visit to Mars, and he requests that it be him as a spy, trying to save the planet as part of the vacation.  Before they can imprint the memory, though, the machine malfunctions, and it turns out that Quaid is a spy, and his wife Lori (Stone) is a secret agent, one who is working for Cohaagen (Cox), the ruthless governor of Mars who is basically having the people there living in poverty because he holds the keys to making the atmosphere habitable.  Quaid, whose actual name is Hauser, goes to Mars, and realizes the woman in his dreams is real, and part of a resistance on the planet to try and overthrow Cohaagen.

This is just part of the plot.  The best things about Total Recall are that they almost completely throw reality or sense or any sort of logical consistency in the script to hell (it backs up the fan theory that all of the scenes after Quaid is put in the chair are a false memory, one he doesn't wake up from before the credits).  This is partially because of Verhoeven's bananas filmography (he was inches away from making Sharon Stone, who is the best performance in this movie by a country mile, into a bonafide movie star in Basic Instinct), but mostly because it's way more fun.  At this point, we've seen a lot of violence from Arnold, but we haven't seen his playful side, and here we get a bit of that.  Schwarzenegger is not a good actor, and even with a decent director like Verhoeven, he can't perform miracles.  But this is a fun performance, one that leans in on the crazy ride and supporting cast of the movie (there's so much double-crossing you'll need a flow chart by the end of it to keep track), and I have to tip my hat to Schwarzenegger for pulling this off.

The film's makeup and visual effects are really what make it famous (how it didn't get a Makeup nomination in 1990, the world will never know).  The film leans in on the mutant freak aspect of the Martians (they look like humans who have been sent through burn makeup...except one woman is a stripper with three breasts because why not), and the effects use that makeup to their effect.  Honestly, this is weird to frame against Terminator 2, which would come out a year later, win the same Oscar (with the same leading man) but would revolutionize the industry while this would only be a good example of it, but the scenes on Mars, particularly the climactic creation of the atmosphere, is funny & thrilling.  I liked it.

Predator (1987)

Film: Predator (1987)

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elpidia Carrilo, Carl Weathers, Richard Chaves, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura

Director: John McTiernan

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Arnold Schwarzenegger: click here to learn more about Mr. Schwarzenegger (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, like most movie stars, has had his love life pretty well-chronicled, but for most of his time as a movie star, it was largely linked to one woman.  He had dated English teacher Barbara Outland (who would eventually write a rather scathing memoir about their time together when he was running for reelection as governor in 2006) before he started acting regularly, but other than a brief fling with Eleanor Mondale in the late 1970's (when her father was vice president), his primary romantic partner was Maria Shriver, the daughter of Sargent & Eunice Shriver, and the niece of President Kennedy (meaning that Schwarzenegger, a future Republican Governor, did in fact date the scions of two major Democratic families).  Shriver & Schwarzenegger's romance was unconventional, but seemingly happy for much of its run.  They had four children, and their political views (while commonly-known) were largely kept quiet given that Shriver was a journalist at NBC at the time.  There was the fun juxtaposition of Arnold campaigning for George HW Bush in 1988 while Maria's senator uncle Ted was stumping for Michael Dukakis, but by-and-large they presented as a solid couple even though Schwarzenegger was repeatedly cheating on his wife (the unkind maxim about Kennedy women looking the other way on their philandering husbands definitely feeling accurate in this case), until it was outed that Schwarzenegger had father a love child with a maid (a story that conveniently happened when Schwarzenegger's political career was coming to a close).  The couple remained married for a decade after this, though, until 2021.

(Spoilers Ahead) The start of their marriage was happening when Schwarzenegger's film career 

was hitting a new height.  Freed of his contract with Dino de Laurentiis, he was able to start making major action films in the vein of someone like Sylvester Stallone, who at the time was a bigger star than Schwarzenegger in the genre even if that wouldn't last very long.  A big part of that was Predator in 1987, which featured Arnold as Major Dutch Schaefer on a rescue mission in Guatemala.  The film, like much of Arnold's movies of the 1980's, is short on actual plot.  All you need to know is that they are on a mission that will soon be deterred because they are being hunted by an extraterrestrial being that is not really referred to (the title word "predator" is never uttered in the movie).  His crew, one-by-one, is picked off, and it's left to Dutch to try to hunt the Predator largely solo, doing so through covering himself in mud (that disguises the creatures vision), eventually resulting him trapping the creature (and it then exploding itself in hopes of killing them both...which he doesn't).

Let's start with the movie and my thoughts before we talk about two oddities about this film in relation to Arnold's career.  First, it's a pretty good.  This is not Celine and Julie Go Boating or any such intellectual exercise as a picture, but it's solidly constructed and has a terrific special effects-driven bit of construction when it comes to the actual creature, both the invisibility effects and then (when it's revealed) the fantastically gross alien practical effects & makeup.  I also loved the film's Deliverance-style vibes, which honestly the further I get into this season, the more I realize that Deliverance had as much of an influence on action films as The Godfather did on mafia movies or Star Wars did on science-fiction.  The film also has one of my all-time favorite closing credits, which has all of the (mostly now dead) characters showing up again in title cards with the actors' names, all of them grinning cheesily like they're in a Mentos commercial...except Arnold who totally botches the concept by just being stoic.

Two things I want to note before we go here.  First, this stars Jesse Ventura in addition to Arnold Schwarzenegger-he plays heavy gunner Blain Cooper, one of the men who fall victim to the Predator in the film's first hour.  This is one of three films starring the two men, along with The Running Man and Batman & Robin.  Ventura would be elected the Governor of Minnesota in 1998 in one of the biggest upsets in American political history, five years before Schwarzenegger, and while they did not mirror each other stylistically in politics (Arnold was much more successful in the job & won reelection, Ventura was so unpopular he couldn't even run for a second term) they both represented a level of "entertainment being crucial in politics" that would come to a shocking result in 2016 on a national scale.

I will also end with this-the Predator films five sequels/prequels...none of which would feature Schwarzenegger.  Schwarzenegger refused to make the sequel due to a salary dispute.  This was also a deterrent in sequels to Conan the Destroyer, Eraser, Total Recall, and Kindergarten Cop, as well as a long-gestating sequel to Twins.  Not all of these are totally attributable to Schwarzenegger's salary disputes (Twins 2 was lost in development hell for decades and eventually crashed with the death of Ivan Reitman), but it's a testament to Schwarzenegger's ability at the box office that he could forego solid paychecks like this, as well as his alleged difficulty offscreen that would result in studios walking away not thinking he was worth the money (or the effort) even with probable hits on their hands.  Compare this to some of his contemporaries like Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren, & especially Sylvester Stallone, when sequels were being made, they tended to feature in them and take the easy paycheck (Jean-Claude van Damme, like Schwarzenegger, tended to not make it through negotiations).  This ended up being a blessing for Schwarzenegger for a while, we'll find with our final two movies, as going for an original concept (and with better directors) made him a much hotter property as a movie star than always needing to go back to the Rocky or Under Siege well.

Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Film: Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Earl Jones, Sandahl Bergman, Ben Davidson, Mako, Max von Sydow

Director: John Milius

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Arnold Schwarzenegger: click here to learn more about Mr. Schwarzenegger (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was a different kind of movie star not because he came with an accent (so did Greta Garbo & Marlene Dietrich) nor because he was a muscle-bound figure (as we talked about a few months ago, Bruce Lee was totally jacked and a huge star both here and abroad).  Schwarzenegger's phenomenal success in large part stemmed from coming at the right time.  In the post-Jaws/Star Wars era, blockbusters were a regular thing, and something happened where we had the effects budget to regularly churn out big, sometimes gaudy action films (which would become Schwarzenegger's bread-and-butter), but also because home video became really important.  If you look at the early successes of Arnold's career (Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator), the films themselves were not massive successes.  Conan was a hit, sure, but its domestic box office was dwarfed by films like An Officer and a Gentleman, Porky's, and even a prestige drama like The Verdict.  The Terminator was the same situation-modest hit, but it was outgrossed by now forgotten films like Tightrope and Breakin'.

Why have you heard of these films as a result?  It's because Schwarzenegger became a star on home video.  Conan the Barbarian was one of four action flicks that Dino de Laurentiis made with Schwarzenegger in the 1980's, and the biggest calling card of these movies was that they would sell better than their theatrical grosses would indicate in the burgeoning home video market.  Conan would, by some estimates, nearly quadruple its initial gross through home video rentals & sales, and The Terminator would do similarly well.  Both films would eventually also have additional success through repeated showings on cable television.  As we'll talk more and more about Arnold over the remainder of the month, you're going to note that this is a pattern-Schwarzenegger was a huge star, but not always through traditional domestic box office like his predecessors, instead relying upon growing international markets & home video sales to ensure that he was always profitable and worth the exorbitant salaries he demanded from the studios...even on films that didn't click with American audiences.

(Spoilers Ahead) Which brings us to the movie, the first narrative film we're talking about with Arnold after last week's documentary.  The film follows Conan (Schwarzenegger), whose parents are murdered when he is a child by cult leader Thulsa Doom (Jones).  Afterward, he is taken into slavery, and forced to work at a mill that turns him into a glistening, muscle-bound gladiator (aka the Arnold we all know and love), and through his time as a gladiator gains his freedom.  This leads him on an adventure, one where he treks across the land to gain his revenge on Thulsa Doom, eventually finding him and beheading him in a dramatic fashion...that allowed for him to come back in a sequel (Arnold always likes to keep his options open for a sequel).

You may note that the intro is way longer than my description of the film, and that's because Conan is practically a silent movie it uses so little traditional dialogue, particularly from Arnold himself.  I can't find an exact account of this, but Schwarzenegger himself has roughly 24 lines in the movie, most of which are reserved for a scene where he beats up & steals from an effeminate priest who is clearly hitting on him (he does not have a line in the first 24 minutes nor the last 25 minutes of the picture).  This isn't unusual for some of Schwarzenegger's early films (I believe he has even less spoken dialogue in The Terminator) and given his limited ability as an actor even when he was actually talking, this may have been for the best.  But it also feels almost silly as it goes, and when he's paired with real performers (like a scene about halfway through the film when he's opposite acting god Max von Sydow), it reads as comically uneven.

But this is kind of the appeal of Dino de Laurentiis's movies (he was the film's producer).  De Laurentiis was capable of greatness (he made some of Fellini's best pictures), but by 1982 de Laurentiis was largely best-known for making profitable schlock.  With Schwarzenegger, he found a goldmine, and they would make four movies together.  The two would have a complicated relationship.  De Laurentiis would get rich off of these movies and Schwarzenegger would become a proper movie star by the end of their partnership (something he likely would've struggled to do in mainstream movies had they not gone down this path...it's easy to see him being more Chuck Norris than Sly Stallone without De Laurentiis's help), but the last two pictures they made together (Raw Deal and in particular Red Sonja) left such bad blood that Schwarzenegger vowed to never work with him again, which meant that the third chapter in the Conan movies never happened.

Which in its way is a pity, because I quite enjoy the camp value & silliness of de Laurentiis films in this era.  Arnold can't act, this is written with an overwrought pen, and it makes all of the actually talented actors in the movies feel like they're in some weird type of kabuki theater...but it's still very watchable.  There's something there...there's a reason this movie became a hit at home, because it's equal parts funny and entertaining, even if it's objectively not good.

Pumping Iron (1977)

Film: Pumping Iron (1977)

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, Mike Katz, Franco Columbu

Directors: George Butler & Robert Fiore

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Arnold Schwarzenegger: click here to learn more about Mr. Schwarzenegger (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

It makes sense to start a month on the man who, more than any other this year, provided the definitive answer to "who is a great action star" with a first for our series.  In nearly seven seasons, we have never done a documentary, mostly because documentaries aren't really something you associate with the creative output of actors.  But Pumping Iron gives us both a really strong set up into Arnold Schwarzenegger, and also is one of the main reasons he became a star.  Growing up in Austria, the son of a local police chief (who was a member of the Nazi Party, something that would haunt Schwarzenegger for the remainder of his life, and would be a marked part of his celebrity donations, giving enormous sums of money to organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center and making a pointed effort to focus on Holocaust remembrance and Jewish organizations in his time in the celebrity spotlight and during his political career), Schwarzenegger's first forays into the spotlight came not from acting but from bodybuilding.  While Schwarzenegger would become the most famous figure in bodybuilding due to his subsequent movie stardom, even without that work, he'd arguably become (give or take Lee Haney & Ronnie Coleman) the most significant athlete just within the sport, and a lot of that is due to his work in Pumping Iron, a documentary that nearly wasn't released due to budgetary issues, but when it was in 1977, became a surprise hit (particularly in early home video sales), and launched Schwarzenegger into acting.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie isn't really a "spoilers needed" situation because it's based in fact, but I'll issue it mostly because the movie is about the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition (and who will win), a bodybuilding feat that is pitting some of the best in this then-niche sport against each other, and we meet them and their families.  The film centers on a number of different figures, and while all of them are big names in bodybuilding (not just because of their success at the time, but also because many of them became famous after this movie came out), you see the pitfalls of the sport, and the ways that only some people get to be the best (while others get to fail in the process).  The monetary award here is clearly secondary to other things, like personal pride, and in the case of the eventual winner (Schwarzenegger) modeling contracts and an intense amount of ego in terms of being near super-human in his perfect physique.

This is the best part of Pumping Iron, a surprisingly strong and intriguing look at a deeply hyper-masculine sport at a time when men weren't being pushed to show their softer side...because the film itself shows its softer side.  We see Mike Katz playing with his kids, and then the disappointment in him when he ends up getting fourth place in the competition he'd been so proud to brag about in the previous scene.  There's Lou Ferrigno, admitting that his parents weren't proud of him initially, and he feels a constant need to push for them to succeed...even though it's clear his parents seem to adore him (whatever the outcome).  And then of course there's Schwarzenegger, who at one point talks about how bodybuilding is the equivalent to having near constant orgasms (he uses the more colorful term of "cumming" that I'm going to use only because it's funny to think a future governor spoke this way even if it might end up getting this post flagged).  But later he has a scene where he talks about missing his own father's funeral because he couldn't deal with the headspace of such actual-world realities when he is in competition mode.  It's said with the same nonchalance as he does when he talks about the sexual gratification he gets from the sport, as if they are similar statements, and not one that's quite silly and the other hauntingly devastating.  It's like watching toxic masculinity, and the damage that it causes, in real time.

But it doesn't feel like toxic masculinity, because Schwarzenegger is unfathomably charming in this.  If you think of him from some of his later action films, where he is forced to drain anything resembling life force in favor of a robotic perfectionism, you are in for a treat.  He is flirty, friendly, braggadocios, and aware that this is a fleeting moment in his life.  You can see that he knows this isn't forever, and in some ways that life isn't forever, so he's going to enjoy and win everything he can from this moment before tackling the next challenge.  It's worth noting that in the immediate aftermath of this movie, it was Ferrigno who had immediate success with the smash hit (pun intentional) The Incredible Hulk which ran for five seasons on CBS.  But Arnold's time was coming, and it would be much, much higher than Ferrigno would ever dare to jump.  We'll talk about that next Saturday.

Saturdays with the Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Harrison Ford, a man who is basically the definition of a modern movie star and would in some ways serve as the template of "action hero with multiple major franchises."  This month, we're going to talk about someone who in many ways was Ford's biggest rival for the title of top action star of the 1980's & 90's (though he was not the rival the press and the actor himself most considered his competition), the only one who would come close to him in terms of tentpole films and action blockbusters.  But this star isn't remembered for that today, primarily because instead of trying new types of movie roles in the 21st Century, he chose instead to go into politics, being elected Governor of California.  This month's star is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger was born in Austria in 1947, just a few years after World War II ended, and as a result, his father Gustav was a Nazi military police officer who fought for the Germans on the Eastern Front.  By all accounts Gustav and young Arnold had a tough relationship, and the younger Schwarzenegger would later characterize what Gustav would do to him as child abuse (it's also worth noting, given his ancestry, that the younger Schwarzenegger would become a prominent ally to the Jewish community, donating huge sums of money to fight anti-semitism, in stark contrast to his father).  Arnold would start weight-training at the age of 13, competing in increasingly high-profile body-building competitions, becoming the youngest ever (a title he still holds) Mr. Olympia, the highest honor in the sport.

Schwarzenegger's movie career started with Hercules in New York (where he was billed by the name Arnold Strong), but despite appearing in a number of films in the 1970's, it wasn't until 1982's Conan the Barbarian that Schwarzenegger became a household name.  He'd follow that up with his most iconic role, as the titular Terminator in James Cameron's 1984 science fiction classic, and for the next few decades, until his time as Governor of California, Schwarzenegger would have a fascinating career, making a series of memorable (if not always quality) action films, most of which would be successful in the United States but even more so internationally and in home video markets, the latter two helping him when his action hero roles began to go out of style in the early 1990's.  This month we'll talk about Schwarzenegger's claims-to-fame, his political career, and what his legacy now feels like when his type of movie star (which inspired many copycats in his day) is all but extinct to modern audiences.

The Devil's Own (1997)

Film: The Devil's Own (1997)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Margaret Colin, Ruben Blades, Treat Williams, George Hearn

Director: Alan J. Pakula

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the late 1990's, Harrison Ford was almost sixty years old, and despite decades of action films, he was starting to show that age.  Instead of playing young rebels & sexy professors onscreen, he was playing the president in movies like Air Force One.  Ford was still an incredibly bankable star (Air Force One was a huge hit & would have long pop culture legs-it's still one of the films that's most name-checked for him), but it was also obvious that gravy train was about to end, and you see that in a film like The Devil's Own released in the same year.  Ford himself had seen a previous generation's action hero serve as his mentor in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Sean Connery playing his father as Connery's career had started to fade.  Here, he was now taking over the father figure role, and young Brad Pitt is the sexy upstart who is at the center of the film even if Harrison Ford gets top billing.  The result is a movie that doesn't really work, and would unfortunately be the harbinger of a lot of Ford films to come.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Frankie McGuire (Pitt), a member of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) who saw his father gunned down for sympathizing with the republicans in the 1970's, and has now joined them & is trying to buy missiles in the United States.  He does so by staying with an NYPD Sergeant Tom O'Meara (Ford), and his family, and we get a few cute scenes where Frankie & Tom bond over shooting pool (and his daughters all develop schoolgirl crushes on the comely Frankie).  But the movie takes a dark turn when the actual task at-hand, buying the missiles from a violent Irish mobster named Billy Burke (Williams) starts to end in bloodshed.  The film becomes a standoff between Frankie, who inadvertently has made Tom's family the target of violent criminals, and Tom himself, now trying to save Frankie as he knows he's headed for either prison or death at this point.

The film's politics are a bit hard to decipher, and haven't aged super well.  The Good Friday Agreements that would happen the following year make trying to decipher which side you were on very different than in the 1990's when the violence in Ireland would've been on the nightly news regularly (I would assume a lot of modern audiences wouldn't entirely know what to do with Pitt's character here).  The film also glorifies the "honest cop" who still lies to get his partner off for murder, and Ford's character in an era were law enforcement is not universally shorthand for being the "good guys" is a bit tough, and honestly indicates in part why the action genre struggled to stay super relevant into the 21st Century.  This bit also feels tagged on, which if you read about the behind-the-scenes drama of this movie, it was (and caused friction between Ford & Pitt, who would never work together again).

But the bigger problem might be the film gets really dull after a while.  There's not enough new here-the film could've used more scenes with the two men together, having them play off of one another and giving us a better sense of their relationship before they start pointing guns at the other guy.  Much has been made about Pitt's (shaky) Irish accent through the years for this film, and I'm not going to pretend it's good, but Pitt is so beautiful and so easy onscreen I don't really care that he doesn't sound super authentic.  Ford, as well, is a solid leading man but he doesn't take to the complicated aspects of the film, and is too stoic compared to Pitt, and honestly (in my opinion) gets outplayed by him.  Ford is so serious that he borders on two-dimensional.  Gone is the easy charm of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, and we don't have the thrills & stakes of something like The Fugitive (nor the actorly sophistication of The Conversation or The Mosquito Coast).

This would in part be the future of Harrison Ford as he would continue to work.  With the exception of What Lies Beneath (I wish he'd done more horror in his career, as this film is terrific), the next few years would be a series of missteps, critically & financially, even in the action genre with pictures like Firewall and K-19: The Widowmaker (I actually saw this in theaters, making me one of the few who did, and found my ticket stub for it randomly the other day...if my brother makes it this far in the review, curious if he remembers which theater we saw this in).  Much of the next few decades would involve revisiting roles (to differing success) in the Star Wars, Blade Runner, & Indiana Jones franchises, but by-and-large, Ford would never really recapture the glamour of either his action hero heyday nor of his unique acting ability in auteur-driven dramas, and in the past few years his best work has been in television.

Next month, we're going to shift to an actor who was very much Ford's action star peer, and like Ford would end up watching his once impenetrable action hero career go down in flames in the late 1990's.  But while Ford would go on to middling success in a series of notable flops, this actor would encounter a second act so unlikely, it would've been scoffed had it been in one his movies (proving that occasionally, truth IS stranger than fiction).

Patriot Games (1992)

Film: Patriot Games (1992)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Anne Archer, Patrick Bergin, SEan Bean, Thora Birch, Samuel L. Jackson, James Fox, Richard Harris

Director: Phillip Noyce

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The past two weeks we have focused on Harrison Ford as he might've been.  With The Conversation, we talked about his unique gifts for character work, giving us an important smarmy (but crucial) character in Gene Hackman's journey in the picture, and then with The Mosquito Coast we saw him attempt to escape the everyman hero that he personified in Han Solo & Indiana Jones to tremendous effect.  But Harrison Ford is not an actor you automatically name-check as a great actor-you think of him as a great movie star, and one who is relatively easy to imitate.  So this week, we're really getting into the era of Ford's "get off my plane!" level of ubiquity.  In the 1990's, Ford was a constant presence in movies and basically competed solely with Tom Cruise as the most invincible of stars at the box office.  Everything he touched would turn to gold, but while Cruise would occasionally challenge himself as an actor in these pictures, Ford didn't.  This isn't to say that Ford made bad movies during the era (ending in the late 1990's, which is where we'll close our month with him next week), but he wasn't racking up Oscar nominations like Cruise was, and most of his films are generic even if they would make buckets of money.  One of the best examples of them, and one of the few I hadn't seen yet (I was alive in the 1990's, and my mom loved Harrison Ford...I saw most of his stuff) is Patriot Games, the first of two outings that Ford would take as CIA analyst Jack Ryan, his other other franchise lead after the two I already name-checked.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Jack Ryan (Ford), a man who used to work for the CIA and is now teaching history at the US Naval Academy.  He, his wife Cathy (Archer), and daughter Sally (Birch) inadvertently witness an IRA terrorist attack on Lord William Holmes (Fox), in which Jack saves Lord Holmes life.  Several members, specifically Sean Miller (Bean) survive Jack's retaliation, though, and are on a quest for revenge against both Lord Holmes (who keeps having people around him dying) and against the Ryans, which escalates to kidnapping attempts on his wife & daughter.  This all ends with us realizing that Holmes' assistant has been a secret informant, and sets up Sean to kill both Lord Holmes and the Ryans in the same party...before Jack saves the day, killing the assistant and Sean Miller in the process.

It's worth noting that this is technically the sequel to another movie, honestly a better one: The Hunt for Red October, where the Jack Ryan character was played by Alec Baldwin (we'll actually discuss this movie a bit before the end of the month in the context of the 1990 Oscar Viewing Project, which I should be done with by next Saturday if all things go according to plan).  A lot of speculation from those in the know (and Baldwin himself) has been stirred about as to why Baldwin, sixteen years Ford's junior at the time and a much more logical choice for a new action franchise, was ousted, with everything from Ford being a bigger star (who had a host of contracts with the studio they were trying to pay off) to Baldwin's salary demands (and legendarily diva-like behavior during his leading man era) all contributing to this bump, but it did happen, and it changes the tenor of the movies.  Baldwin's screen persona was always a bit more seductive & (save for Han Solo) wrier than Ford's, and it shows that Patriot Games is kind of dull.

It's not that it's necessarily bad, because it's not.  The supporting cast (actors like Harris, Bean, & Jackson) are all made up of properly good actors, and Ford knows how to command a screen, but it's also generic.  There's nothing really special about Jack Ryan, nothing that we get to know-this feels like he's just playing Harrison Ford in the way that someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger would become famous for at the same time-not giving us anything beyond what's expected.  Ford, though, was a better actor than Arnold, and it's a pity this is what he has spent much of the latter part of his career doing.  It says something that while Ford was called upon decades after-the-fact to play both Han Solo and Indiana Jones, because no one could imagine anyone else playing these parts (apologies to Alden Ehrenreich), by 2002 when they were making the long-awaited sequel to Clear and Present Danger (Ford's second outing as Jack Ryan), it was Ben Affleck, not Ford, who ended up playing the part.  Had he not been going through one of the messiest Hollywood divorces of the era, Alec Baldwin might've enjoyed the karmic revenge of Ford finally losing out on his part to a younger actor.

The Mosquito Coast (1986)

Film: The Mosquito Coast (1986)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, Andre Gregory, River Phoenix, Martha Plimpton

Director: Peter Weir

Oscar History: No nominations, though both Ford and composer Maurice Jarre got Golden Globe nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Harrison Ford was not the first actor associated with a specific role or being unable to escape from it.  But in the modern era of filmmaking (i.e. post-Jaws) he really personified the actor whose characters ended up being too popular for him to stop doing them. In the 1980's, this meant that Ford made a number of films as both Han Solo & Indiana Jones (from 1980-84, he made four of them alone, and only took a break for Blade Runner, a rather difficult shoot for the actor despite its later cult status).  But unlike the 1990's, when Ford's dramatic attempts outside of action-adventure would become something of a source of ridicule (and not inspire a lot of critical hosannas), in the 1980's he had a lot of acclaim on this front, particularly in the movie of Peter Weir.  In 1985, he starred in the blockbuster hit Witness, which won him his first (and to date only) Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.  In 1986, he appeared in another dramatic departure from Weir, but unlike Witness it was a flop (he'd recover pretty quickly two years later with the massive success of Working Girl, a movie which got pretty much everyone in the cast but him an Oscar nomination).  The Mosquito Coast is a unique film though (and Ford has frequently cited it as his favorite) given how well it captured a certain type of toxic masculinity, and how brittle & unrelenting Ford's portrayal of the main character is right up until the end credits.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Allie Fox (Ford), an inventor who hates the American Dream, capitalism, and a global economy that relies upon foreign industries to keep it afloat (there's an early scene where he eviscerates a shop owner for carrying products made in Japan, which in the 1980's you can't entirely tell if this is just him leaning in on Reagan conservatism or makes him truly xenophobic).  After yet another employer being disappointed with his impressive inventions (in this case a house that can make ice), he decides to move his family to the jungles of Belize, where he buys a village in the rainforest.  Allie, his wife Margot (Mirren), whom he constantly calls "Mother," and their four children, including eldest son Charlie (Phoenix) initially find success introducing his impressive inventions to the jungle.  But his paranoia starts to settle in.  He convinces his family that a nuclear war has struck America, destroying the country, and when a group of rebels take over his camp, he murders them (not in the way he planned, initially wanting to freeze them to death but instead having them burned to death in an explosion that pollutes the river).  Eventually he drives his family mad with loyalty tests, and is shot by a missionary whom Allie is convinced is running a Christian concentration camp, killing him as his family finally finds freedom.

It's easy to see, watching the film, why it didn't resonate with Reagan America, even with (or maybe especially because of) Harrison Ford in the lead.  The movie is dark, and shows a toxicity in the male ego that you don't usually find here.  In the 1980's, with Reagan promising a return of the American Dream for white families (and in particular white men) while widening income gaps and unsteady unemployment numbers took its toll on Middle America figures like the Fox family.  Huey Long had said that "every man is a king" and in the 1980's that was the reigning theology for conservative men, and while Allie Fox presents as being anti-capitalist, he is deeply conservative about gender & family life, and that shows in the way that he blames women and people of color for his failures to be truly successful the way he trains his children to think he should be.  It's hard not to watch this film, and in particular the way that he treats his wife Margot (not physically abusing her, but clearly indulging in what we'd now consider emotional abuse) and think of the MAGA movement, and the way that it tries to get back to this era...knowing full well that it is filled with angry men who still blame the world for their failures.

Ford's portrayal of Allie Fox is really good, and it's in part because he doesn't let up on him.  Most actors, particularly ones who are super reliant upon audiences wanting to root for them, wouldn't have allowed their characterization to be so unsympathetic.  They would've given him redemption, or an apology scene with Helen Mirren at the end of the movie.  But thankfully Weir doesn't do that, and we get with Ford's performance a broken man, one you might understand where he's coming from because he's the product of his environment (capitalism can tear us all apart in the end), but who is also so egocentric he doesn't acknowledge the harm he's doing because it's his harm.  In a year where men like Graham Platner (who put so much of the blame for their failings on others rather than himself) are being celebrated by the left (and Donald Trump, doing the same thing, is a deity for the right), it's hard not to think that Mosquito Coast and Ford's layered performance aren't ahead of their time.

OVP: The Conversation (1974)

Film: The Conversation (1974)

Stars: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Harrison Ford's public persona has long been of a man who didn't really want to be a movie star.  A lot of this, I have long-suspected, is at least partially untrue (otherwise why do it, especially when he became bonkers rich & didn't really need to do it anymore...after all, his wife is also a talented actor who now rarely works).  But it is interesting that Ford's fame came relatively late.  The role that made him a movie star was Star Wars, which was released just days before his 35th birthday. For comparison's sake with some of his 1970's peers, Al Pacino at that age had several Oscar nominations and the Godfather franchise, Dustin Hoffman had been Ben Braddock & Ratso Rizzo, and Jack Nicholson & Peter Fonda had both boarded a motorcycle into legend.  Ford spent much of the 1970's balancing his time between small roles in movies and making furniture for people like Joan Didion, Valerie Harper, & George Lucas.  Ford's movie career, though, is really interesting because he appeared in a lot of interesting movies, among them Michelangelo Antonioni's controversial Zabriskie Point, and three Best Picture nominees: American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and today's film The Conversation.  For all of the talk about Ford at one point before Han Solo nearly quitting the industry to work as a high-profile carpenter, the more intriguing idea might be what he did in this film: taking on the role of distinctive, very handsome character actor in important auteur-driven features.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Conversation is a movie best headed into with you knowing as little as is humanly possible, so while I provide a spoiler alert on all of my reviews because I generally want to know as little as possible about all movies I'm going to, this one in particular it helps to go in blind so I'll reiterate that now.  The movie follows Harry Caul (Hackman), a man who runs a service that essentially follows people and records them for money (it is not lost on me that The Conversation, which competed with Chinatown for Best Picture in 1974, bears a striking resemblance to the Roman Polanski film as both are about private investigators who uncover more than they expected from a routine case).  Unlike Jake Gittes, Harry Caul does not advertise and is not well-known for his work.  He is, instead, anonymous to the point of unhealthy, keeping everything about him at a distance to the point his girlfriend (Garr) doesn't ever visit his apartment and he doesn't even have his own phone.  This is driven by wanting to avoid retribution, but also the very real threat of violence in his career.  Similar to Chinatown (again) there are allusions to a previous case throughout the film that the audience only understands to be too horrific to mention, and that haunt both detectives to the point they are constantly in fear of repeating it.

The Conversation is considered a landmark film, but because Francis Ford Coppola had it come out the same year The Godfather, Part II (one of the greatest movies ever made), it always feels like it doesn't get its due, and so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect headed into this-would it be a really handsome movie, one that stands up but can't compare with a picture as perfect as Godfather II, or would it be just as exceptional.  Again, similar to Chinatown, it's not clear until the last moments what's happening, and it's also not clear where The Conversation will land in that comparison.  But as the movie concludes, you realize it's also a true masterpiece.  We understand as the film ends that Harry has no idea what he's walked into, and what he's helped cause.  He assumes that the conversation between Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams at the beginning of the movie is of a couple that might be having an affair, and becomes concerned when he uncovers (while listening to the clips that he initially won't hand over to a man known as "the Director's" assistant without first meeting the Director himself) that a part of the clips that he couldn't initially hear says "he'd kill us if he got the chance."  When he meets the Director (played by an uncredited Robert Duvall) he becomes worried for the young couple's safety as it's clear Cindy Williams is the Director's wife.  But as we learn in the waning moments of the film, he's missed something on the tapes-the emphasis in Forrest's reading of the word "us."

Because as the film ends, it's a case where Frederic Forrest has murdered Robert Duvall's husband with help from his lover, leaving all of the money (and secret organization he has) to Cindy Williams, and leaving them the opportunity to end up together.  The movie's sound work is legendary (and Oscar-nominated) for a reason, as not only is the entire setup with Hackman's Harry filled with us getting whirs & blurs from the recording equipment, but also the film tells in flashback narrative things the audience will have missed.  The film clearly inspired everything from The Usual Suspects to Severance (which borrows heavily from The Conversation's score), and you see why-this is a movie that shows paranoia is justified...and cannot be resolved.  We end the movie with Harry knowing he is being watched, knowing that he can't escape or be safely private...and having to give in to that to not go mad.

Harrison Ford's role is a key component & a crucial part of this story, even if he's only in about three scenes.  He plays the Director's assistant, and plays him with a level of bureaucratic cool that you kind of just assume he's a jackass (also according to most reports, Ford played him as gay which kind of comes across in the way he's super bitchy in a way you don't find a male character in the 1970's, even if there's no hint of this other than him wearing a stylish green suit in one scene that Ford bought with his own money), one who has gotten to this position through being absurdly handsome and honestly it's the sort of character you assume you don't need to pay attention to as the movie progresses.  Because I am writing this about Ford, though, I was paying attention, and it gives you a whole other angle here.  Ford's Martin Stett is the only figure in the film who 100% knows everything that's going on we learn as the film goes by-he works for the Director, but he's also clearly aware of the affair, and given that he's still working for Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams in the end, it's possible he orchestrated all of this in connection with them.  The paranoia seeps into the actual film...was this all a setup to use Harry, kill the Director, and give the young couple everything they wanted?  Only Ford's Stett, who calls Hackman in the end to tell him he's being watched, knows for certain, and makes him the true antagonist of the picture.  Ford is good in this, and as we'll talk about next week, that layered acting ability didn't totally diminish when his visage started to adorn the postered walls of teenage boys, but as I said above-it's hard not to think of Ford in the same way we think of someone like Robert Duvall or John Cazale, someone who added extra layers to already great movies, as a supporting character actor, while watching The Conversation.

Saturdays with the Stars: Harrison Ford

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Bruce Lee, an actor who (like Steve McQueen before him) died relatively young and forged a type of movie star that hadn't really been seen before.  This month, as promised, we are going to start a six-month run of actors who made virtually all of their successful films post-1975.  To start that, we'll begin with the one guy who did have two big movies before 1975 (American Graffiti & The Conversation), but who would become synonymous with two characters that would reshape the cinematic landscape after Jaws, and make him the movie star's movie star, an action hero that the whole family could root for, even if his prickly public demeanor might bristle at such superlatives.  This month's star is Harrison Ford.

Born in Chicago, Ford (like Bruce Lee last month) had a clear path before him if he followed his parents' footsteps into show business.  His mother was a radio actress, and his father a former actor & advertising executive.  He grew up in a mixed faith household, his mother being Jewish while his father was Irish-Catholic, and both were quite progressive, something that Ford would carry for the rest of his life (the rare action film star of the modern era that is very much a Democrat).  Though incredibly handsome, Ford's initial forays into entertainment were middling, getting bit roles in westerns while George Hamilton & James Caan (both roughly the same age as Ford) got top-billing in the same pictures.  So frustrated with acting was he that he had a side gig as a carpenter (one of his clients included writer Joan Didion), and were it not for George Lucas seeing his potential in American Graffiti, he might have made that his life.

But Lucas saw something in Ford that soon the entire world would, as he put him as Han Solo in Star Wars, a movie that would make him a household name, while Lucas (as a producer) a few years later would give Ford the role he might be most synonymous with, Indiana Jones.  These two movies launched highly lucrative franchises for Ford, but they were hardly the only movies that really commanded the public's attention.  Throughout the 1980's and 90's, Ford was one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood, particularly when it comes to launching action franchises.  So famous is Ford that part of me almost didn't want to include him here because I struggled to come up with four major films that I hadn't seen of his (according to Letterboxd, I have seen 28 of his films).  So while we won't review Star Wars and Indiana Jones (as I've seen them all many times), we will talk about them, alongside some of Ford's other biggest pictures of the era, including two forays into more serious acting.