Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

The Specialist Blu-ray Movie Review

Specializing in the Ridiculous -- and Having a Blast Doing It

Reviewed by Michael Reuben August 10, 2011

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.



From this point forward, bombs keep exploding and motives keep criss-crossing. By the last half hour of the film, you can feel the editor, Jack Hofstra (The Stunt Man), jettisoning chunks of exposition, because no one cares. (It's easy enough to fill in the missing explanations, if you stop and think for a moment.) What counts is attitude, and the film has three leads that are (you'll pardon the term) specialists at delivering it. Stallone, though playing a killer for hire, is every inch the picture of moral rectitude, because, unlike Trent, Ray has a "code". Woods makes Trent a bundle of angry resentment, who can't believe that he, the smartest guy in the room -- no, the building; no, the city; no, the state, the nation, the world! -- has to suffer all these fools; he'd rather blow them all up. As for Stone, let's just say that, if Hitchcock had still been making films, this would have been the moment in her career to become one of his coolly dangerous, ambiguous blondes.

But beyond these basics, no one involved in the film -- not the actors, not the screenwriter, Alexandra Seros (Point of No Return) and certainly not the director, Luis Llosa (Anaconda) -- ever gave a second thought to such trivia as consistency, motivation or logic. When test audiences indicated that they wanted to see more action from Stallone's Ray, the filmmakers were only too happy to oblige. They added an early sequence in which Ray decimates a gang of street punks bothering people on a city bus. It had nothing to do with the plot, but it was lively, violent and showed Ray's passion for justice, just like the lone gunslinger who gallops into town and saves a damsel in distress. Never mind that the whole reason Ray rides the bus, as carefully explained later in the movie, is to be stealthy, while he travels to distant pay phones where he can ply his illegal trade under the radar. Good luck remaining unnoticed after shattering the window of a metropolitan vehicle by throwing a guy through it, in front of a dozen witnesses.

Similarly, Ned Trent can't go anywhere without making a spectacle of himself, waving guns and generally screaming. In a world that even remotely resembled ours, he'd be constantly under arrest and in the papers, and the Leon family would quickly find a new head of security and consign Trent to landfill. As for Stone, she's beautiful, damaged, seductive, and apparently independently wealthy, because she never works, but has a lovely residence, a limitless supply of designer outfits and travels by limousine. She's also in the kind of perfect physical shape that's rarely seen in people suffering from chronic depression. Indeed, by the time she and Ray get down to business for their big love scene, it's more of an exhibit than an emotional experience. Their bodies look as art-directed as the fancy hotel room where they meet.

John Barry's gorgeous score glides effortlessly over the whole nutty affair, giving it a soul that it otherwise probably doesn't deserve. It says a great deal about Barry's contribution that, in the huge conflagration that serves as the film's climax, the score and the explosions begin with equal weight, but gradually the explosions fade away. By the end, it's the score that reigns over the destruction. There's a brief coda to tie up some loose ends, and then a maroon convertible drives off to Gloria Estefan singing "Turn the Beat Around".

As Pierce Brosnan said while filming his first Bond film: "It's a hoot!"

The Specialist Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Specialist Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

The Specialist Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Theatrical Trailer (SD; 1.85:1, enhanced; 1:58): It sells the film, but it doesn't really convey the deliciously loopy tone. If you watch closely, though, it's obvious that there were alternate takes and deleted material, which would have made for interesting extras.

The Specialist Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.