about what I expected, which was... a crappy Stallone "kid" flick

Rating: 3/10 (11 April 2009)

Over the Top should not, I repeat, should NOT inspire the kind of hopefulness that the film will be like Shoot em Up, where the title indicates what the movie will be and the final product lives up to the title and then some. No, this is not an over-the-top vehicle for Stallone, which should be easy enough. It's instead an estranged father/son story about a trucker who arm wrestles for extra cake. Um, should I go on? It's not very over the top, since the title instead refers to the term used when an arm wrestler is about to pin another guy who has the other guy's arm pinned down during the match, hence going OVER the TOP of the uh, something.
The movie provides us with a story that is about as hackneyed and idiotic as one can imagine, with sappy twists like a dead mom and a muddled custody battle between Stallone and Robert Loggia, who has almost nothing to work with here (I might mention the actor playing the son but it would give too much credit, though since this is a mention already I should say that he's a terrible actor, not the worst in the children lot but enough to make most others cringe reciting the dialog). Basically none of the characters are much likable, even for Stallone he's a dead-beat dad who somehow is given a slight break since his ex-wife is a total B-word and her father is a rich control freak with hired goons and private jets and wont let go of his grandson until.... Stallone wins a big arm-wrestling match in Vegas?
Part of the reason I wanted to check out Over the Top, directed by one of the Golan-Globus guys (you know, the ones who actually agreed to produce that disaster King Lear by Godard, among other 80s hit or misses, mostly misses), was that it was about arm wrestling. This isn't a sport at all, though one of the half-crazy half-dumbass things about the movie is that it portrays it as if it has a gigantic and rabid fan-base (frankly I'd think cockfighting would get bigger crowds). At the least it's sort of interesting to watch as an activity, and even fun to do with equally strong or even weak armed friends. In the hands of Stallone and company it's as equally dumb as the plot and characters; one laughable bit, amid a bunch of "interviews" done in documentary style (!) with the arm wrestlers is when Stallone's Hawk(s) says that turning his hat around backwards somehow gives him special powers in the matches!
If there were more things like that, or that one Stalloney bit where he smashes Terry Funk through the window or crashes his truck all through Loggia's property with no real consequences, it might have been a lot more so-bad-it's-fun super-80's material. As it is, it's just mind-bogglingly stupid, with its few respites of guilty pleasure overwhelmed by the terrible writing (the guy who did In the Heat of the Night wrote this!) and terrible direction.