5.7 | / 10 |
Users | 3.5 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Set in Miami, an explosives expert helps a seductive beauty avenge the murder of her parents, teaming up against a formidable trio of villains: a powerful Cuban crime boss, his son, and their merciless hit man.
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, James Woods, Rod Steiger, Eric RobertsAction | 100% |
Thriller | 82% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital 5.1
German: Dolby Digital 5.1
Italian: Dolby Digital 5.1
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0
Portuguese: Dolby Digital 2.0
Japanese: Dolby Digital 2.0
Both Castillian and Spanish. Japanese track is hidden
English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Films play out in an alternate reality, and it usually writes its own rules. Coincidences are accepted; practical necessities like food, sleep, hygiene and finance are overlooked; and the human tolerance for pain and injury falls somewhere between Wile E. Coyote and the vampires on True Blood. In a fantasy franchise like the James Bond films, all bets are off. We recognize the superficial resemblance between Bond's world and ours, but we know from the outset that never the twain shall meet. (I picked the Bond example on purpose, for reasons that will become obvious shortly.) The Specialist is a mulligan stew of a picture that's been mashed up from genres having little in common other than the common requirement of suspending disbelief: a little spy thriller, some film noir, add a portion of lone gunslinger with an aching conscience, mix in equal parts revenge tale and doomed love affair, and finish with a large portion of urban crime drama topped with a bomb. The results should taste awful, which is what a lot of critics said when the film was released in 1994. But some viewers, myself included, found the stuff addictive, like great junk food that you know you shouldn't like, but for some reason it tastes really, really good. The film was produced by Jerry Weintraub, who's known for a unique ability to coordinate ensembles of stars, most recently in the three Ocean's films. For The Specialist, Weintraub snagged the buzzworthy pairing of Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone, but that wasn't all. He also got James Woods, who gave perhaps his most deliriously unhinged performance in a career that's studded with them. (Woods knew exactly what he was doing; it's what the film needed.) Then he persuaded the one and only Rod Steiger to go over the top and beyond, playing a Cuban drug lord with an accent thicker than Al Pacino's in Scarface. And he got five-time Oscar winner John Barry, the composer who created the sonic landscape for James Bond (there's that Bond connection I promised) to compose one of the most lushly yearning, romantically earnest scores of Barry's prolific career. Every time the action on screen starts you giggling (and it does so often, and not always on purpose), Barry's score pulls you back. It's one of those musical magic tricks that great composers pull off in plain sight, with nothing up their sleeves.
Now, djou go out and djou find this es-splosive es-spert, and djou bring him to me alive. - Joe Leon to Ned Trent (subtitled for the accent-impaired)We open in 1984 in Bogota, Colombia, where a CIA hit team has been sent to assassinate a drug lord. The team consists of Ray Quick (Stallone) and Ned Trent (Woods), both of whom specialize in explosives. At the last moment, though, Ray spots a child in the car they're supposed to blow sky-high and wants to abort the mission. Trent refuses, and the former partners fall out violently, but not before Trent triggers the bomb. Ray rats out Trent to the CIA, ending Trent's career (and presumably his own). Cut to Miami, present day. Well, not really present day, because there's no internet and email communication consists of posts on "BBS" servers (remember those?) sent via 14.4k modems (so quaint!). Ray is living "off the grid", and he's been supporting himself doing hits for hire with the skills he acquired as a government operative. At least, that's what we're supposed to believe, because we never actually see him do any job, except for the one that's being dangled in front of him at the beginning of the film. We're led to understand that he's picky about his clients, because he's still brooding over the innocent life he failed to save in Bogota. And something about the woman whose BBS ad he most recently answered doesn't feel right. Her name is May Munro (Stone), and she wants Ray to avenge the murder of her parents by drug dealers when she was a little girl. (This would put May in her early twenties, given the relative age of other characters, and Stone was thirty-six at the time, but it's best not to examine these things too closely.) The motive for the murder is vague -- the father "saw something he shouldn't have" -- but little May saw the killers: young Tomas Leon (Eric Roberts) and two henchmen from the Leon crime family, headed by Joe Leon (Steiger). May wants Tomas and the two thugs dead, and she wants the job done by Ray, because "bullets are imprecise" and she's heard that he "shapes" his charges, which has somehow convinced her that an explosion will be safer for everyone. (I don't buy it either, but this is the world of The Specialist.) "I don't do jobs like this", Ray tells her. (Jobs like what? Kill drug dealers?) So May goes it alone, adopting an alias and pretending to date Tomas. Watching the reptilian psychopath cuddle her from afar (and not so far), Ray can't take it anymore and accepts the job. As for Trent, wouldn't you know it? He's become head of security to the Leon family, where he's currently a rival with Tomas for Papa Joe's favor. The constant squabbling annoys the old man, but he seems willing to put up with it. (Maybe it suits his purposes to have his underlings undercut each other.) When the first bomb goes off -- a spectacular blast in a glitzy brothel -- Trent recognizes the signature style of his old partner and gets Joe Leon to put him in charge of tracking down the attacker. His real motive, of course, is revenge on the man who wrecked his CIA career.
Jeffrey Kimball shot The Specialist, and Stallone must have liked working with him, because he hired Kimball fifteen years later to shoot The Expendables. The 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray nicely reproduces Kimball's signature glossy, saturated style, while also capturing some of the variations that The Specialist requires for scenes featuring such elements as heavy smoke in the aftermath of explosions, or Miami pastels (e.g., at the party thrown by the Leon family early in the film), or the dark shadows inside a large church where several key scenes occur, or the varying light levels inside Ray's workshop. Black levels are excellent, shadow detail is strong, and I saw no indication of digital filtering or compression-related artifacts.
The film's original 5.1 track is presented in DTS lossless. This was an early discrete 5.1 mix, and because of the nature of the action, the part of the system the sound designers chose to explore was the ".1". This becomes evident in the opening Bogota sequence, as Ray and Trent approach a bridge over a dam, and the thunder of the water grows louder as they draw closer. And then, of course, there are the explosions. Given the nature of the action, there is relatively little in the way of notable rear channel activity, but sounds are often spread (and occasionally panned) between left and right. Again, it's as if the sound designers were exploring a brave new world. If you're familiar with John Barry's score on the soundtrack album, as I am, hearing it again in the film mix is a reminder of how carefully Barry wrote to the mood of the imagery onscreen -- and how elegantly the sound mixers interwove his music with the effects and dialogue to arrive at the final result. It's an excellent track.
Given the barebones nature of the release, I'm surprised Warner didn't pair The Specialist with another Stallone film in one of their double feature Blu-rays. Then again, they may expect the bulk of the disc's sales to come from the international market, which is where the film did most of its box office. It's unfortunate that Warner made no effort to create supplements for the earlier laserdisc or DVD releases, because it's unlikely that anything worthwhile can be made now, when the film's principals are so far away from the project (and, sadly, John Barry passed away earlier this year). We're left with the film itself, and for those who enjoy its guilty pleasures, this version is highly recommended.
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