Nighthawks (1981)

Last night I saw Nighthawks again, an early-80s cop thriller starring Sylvester Stallone. The plot is about a pair of New York undercover cops (Stallone and Lando Calrissian) who are enlisted to help stop the rogue terrorist Wulfgar (Rutger Hauer). It's an interesting film as a time capsule piece on how the threat of terrorism was dramatized in the Reagan era.

What I found most interesting, however, is the amount of focus placed on the impotence of the Stallone character. Most action heroes are men/women of action; Stallone's Deke DaSilva spends the whole movie pretty much just passively reacting and is unable to take the shot that would kill Wulfgar – he says he didn't get into the police business to kill people. Add to this the fact that his wife has left him because he didn't pay her enough attention; he has nerdy glasses and a nerdy beard; he begins and ends the film in women's clothing; and he spends much of the rest of the film wearing cardigans and tank tops. (Stallone never strips down to show off the physique on which he built his career.) Before becoming a cop, we learn that DaSilva had been a Vietnam war hero with 52 kills to his name, suggesting that that experience had totally scarred him ... and making DaSilva an interesting precursor to John Rambo, who Stallone would play the following year in First Blood.

I often think that action thrillers these days are filled pretty boys pretending to be larger than life heroes: Ben Affleck, Keanu Reeves, Will Smith, Paul Walker, Maaaatt Daaaamon. There doesn't seem to be many, or any, leading men left who have the weight of experience or the presence of tough guy actors like Lee Marvin, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Clint Eastwood, Warren Oates, or even Stallone. The narratives that have been built up around these older actors in the popular consciousness is that they were Real Men, symbols of American brawn and masculinity. But it's interesting how frequently they played broken, vulnerable, and impotent. Their cool factor, I guess, is that they each had a persona of being guys that had nothing to prove to anyone but themselves, which gave them room to explore and subvert American myths of masculinity – a subject that Hollywood action cinema has always been about. I'm not sure I could say the same thing about the current crop of action stars.