Sly movie review & film summary (2023) | Roger Ebert (2024)

Sylvester Stallone has always been known for his physicality,but Thom Zimny'sdocumentary "Sly" confirms that it was his voice that made him a star.

Actually, as the movie makes clear,there aretwo voices, intertwined.One isthe New York-accented baritone croak that Stallone speaks with, slurred by an accident during deliverythat paralyzed parts of his face. The other voice is the one that comes off the pages of the scripts thatStallone writes (and, in many cases, rewrites—sometimes on the spot). Stallone hasonly been nominated for one major writing award, Best Original Screenplay for the first "Rocky," which seems as much of a reward for creating his own Cinderella story in Hollywood as for the work itself. But as "Sly" demonstrates, every project Stallone touches becomes a Stallone film, even if it wasn't intended as such. The words and stories and themes come from a personal place, whether he's inhabiting human-scaled characters likethe boxerRocky Balboa and themeek sheriffFreddy Heflinin "Copland," or playingjacked-upkillers like super-soldierJohn Rambo, the snarling heroesof "Cobra" and "Demolition Man" and "Judge Dredd,"andmercenary Barney Ross in the "Expendables" series.

Everything he works on ends upsoundinglike him, because Stallone made it sound like him or because younger writers who grew up watching his movies knew how to write for him.For better or worse, therewas never any mistaking his work for anybody else's. And after an astounding fourteen-year stretch that contained the first five "Rocky" movies and three "Rambo films,"he kept reinventing himself, alternating red meat action flicks with attempts at farce ("Oscar," "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot") and romance ("Rhinestone").Even Arnold Schwarzenegger—his only plausible rival for the 1980s and '90s he-man cinema crown—tells "Sly" that he was in awe of Stallone's ability to stay a half-step ahead of him even at the peak of his ambition and fame, and to have enough focus and drive to simultaneously wear fourhats (actor, writer, director, producer) on signature projects.

"Sly" gives Stallone his due as a pop culture force. Director Zimny isbest known for his documentary and music video work for Bruce Springsteen. He brings a Springsteen-y working-class-hero framing to Stallone, having himrevisit his tough childhood in Hell's Kitchen, New York City; setting his legend in opposition to the nepotismand trust-fund babies who dominate the entertainment industry; and threading his painfulrelationship with his fatherFrancesco "Frankie" Stallone, Jr. through much of the story. Stallone's youngerbrother, actor/musician Frank Stallone, joins Sly in speaking frankly about their father's seemingly unrelenting meanness.

Stallone's fathertook young Sly to Maryland after splitting from the boys' mother, wrestling promoter Jackie Stallone, bought some cheap horses, and took up polo. Jackie, meanwhile,brought Sly's kid brother with her to Philadelphia, the setting for most of the "Rocky" series. The movie is powerful when it focuses on Stallone recounting the countless disappointments of his relationship with his father, usually in wry, understated language that only amplifies how awful it must have been.When the brothers became adults,theirfathershifted from verbal and physical abuse to jealousy,pettiness, and public displays of knife-twisting cruelty; it allseemed driven by the pain of watching his children exceed him, a sight that would fulfill a dream for most parents.Stallone never stopped trying to win his father's love, often by purchasing it with extravagant gifts.

Elsewhere, "Sly" is a frustratingly unrealized work, hovering on the edge of insight. It was smart of Zimny to putStallone front and center and let him guidethe audience through his life with the same affable, eloquent, man-of-the-people energy that he brought to so many talk show appearances over the years. But the downside of that access, perhaps,is a film that sands the roughest edges off Stallone and his work.

Stallone was anuncouth palookapunchline for legacy Hollywoodand the snarks ofjournalism. "Sly" barely touches on that, except to let Stallone and other interviewees call him an outsider or underdogwithout delving into what the words meant in context of an Italian-American New Yorker with a speech impediment suddenly becoming rich and famous without learning to be smooth and classy first.Nor is there much about Stallone'smarriages, save his third, which is treated glancingly, orhis children (except for Sage Stallone, who died unexpectedly at 36). When Stallone says he regrets having put his work ahead of his parenting, the moment is so affecting that one wishes the film had probed it more.

You can't quite call "Sly" a deep dive into the work, either. It spends much of itsfirst half getting to the original "Rocky" and sprints through most of the rest, with pauses for highlights like the "Rambo" films and "Copland." And it elides some aspects of what Stallone's career, in a larger sense, meant to 20th-century America.He wasa poster boy for certain mindsets. Itseems hard to imagine today, with Rocky defined for younger generationsas "Unc,"the crusty old mentor of Donnie Creed in the "Creed" series, and jocular action figure Barney Ross in the "Expendables" franchise,but the "Rocky" movies in the '70s and '80s were "issues" as well as films, asdiscussed for their exploitativeracial politics as their entertaining qualities. The character of Apollo Creed in the first filmwas Muhammad Ali the way awhite ethnicNixon-era "hardhat" would have viewed him—as arich and arrogantbraggart; when Apollo was humbled and softenedin the third film, it was to position him as a preferable alternative toClubber Lang, a snarlingghetto gargoyle.

The"Rambo" series, meanwhile,started out as a wilderness survival tale with a traumatized Vietnam vet as its heroand hippie-hating backwoods cops and National Guardsmenas its antagonists, thentook a right-wing turn in 1985with the second entry in the series, a P.O.W. rescue fantasy wherein Rambo killed bushels of Vietnamese and dozens of Russians. The "Rocky" series joined Rambo in Reagan-landthat yearwith "Rocky IV," which pitted Rocky against a gigantic, scowling, platinum blondeSoviet who seemed to have steppedout of a James Bond flick.

Throughout most of the next 15 years, Stallone became the anti-Springsteen, incarnating white ethnic grievance and reactionary fervor and joining Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, and Bruce Willis in stumping for right-wing politicians. A 1985 Newsweek cover story headlined "Showing the Flag: Rocky, Rambo, and the Return of the American Hero" anointed him as the successor to JohnWayne. It would have been fascinating to hear Stallone talk about all thiswith his customary humor and self-deprecating insight,but "Sly" doesn't so much downplay politics as duck them, like Rocky avoiding a haymaker.(I'd bet good money that two of Zimny's keyinterviewees, NewYork Times culture writer Wesley Morris and writer/director Quentin Tarantino, had plenty to say on all of thesetopics, whether or not Zimny asked for their opinions.)

There might be a more challenging movie in the deleted footage. Stallone gives great quote and is willing togo into controversial areas when interviewers encourage him. He was in his mid-seventies when "Sly" was shot and had recently done a feature-length documentary about his artisticprocess, "The Making of Rocky vs. Drago," focusing on his belated re-cut of "Rocky IV," which restoreda lot of the character development he'd junked to shorten the film's running time in 1985. That film will likely be more satisfying for devotees of Stallone the filmmaker and icon, as it goes into the nuts-and-bolts of filmmaking, image-shaping, and psychology, and provides just as much personal insight. And oddly, although it's very muchStallone's movie, it feels less guarded, and less like an ad for a self-created brand.

On Netflix now.