The first and only Rocky spin-off?

Rating: 4/10 (15 December 2008)

So I had been under the impression that the United States Military taught things like respect and honor and loyalty and determination. In Over The Top, we are introduced to the graduating class of what I imagine is something like the Junior Marines, where a trucker named Lincoln Hawk has an estranged son celebrating his successful completion of the program. But just when you might think that this place is turning out honorable and respectful young men, we meet Hawk's son, an arrogant little punk more in need of a smack than Rocky's son in Rocky 5. And that is BAD.
He immediately berates Lincoln for his dirty truck and scruffy appearance, wildly disrespecting him and acting like a snotty rich kid. Do you meant to tell me that this place, representing the United States of America, is churning out little punks that demand club soda with lemon when offered water?
Over The Top was released into theaters just over four months before Full Metal Jacket. This may be part of the reason why so few people remember this movie.
At any rate, Lincoln ran out on his family when his son Michael was a baby, so Michael was raised by his wealthy grandfather. Now Lincoln wants to make amends for past mistakes, so he picks up Michael from his military school and takes him on a cross-country road trip home.
At first Michael is an insufferable jerk, but ultimately warms up to Lincoln as Lincoln teaches him, through arm-wrestling, that he learned nothing about being a man in his time at the military school, but now Lincoln can teach him all he needs to know about manhood and fatherly responsibility by arm-wrestling a lot of sweaty meatheads.
I love the realism in the movie. Lincoln Hawk is a quiet, respectful man who only wants to have a relationship with his son. He honestly regrets his past mistakes and will do anything to make them right. Nevertheless, Michael's grandfather wants him out of Michael's life so badly that, even after Lincoln drives his semi-truck through the man's multi-million dollar mansion, he offers to drop all charges if Lincoln will just leave the state.
Really? That's all? After what must have been hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage inflicted with a deadly vehicular weapon?
I guess so, because Lincoln has no choice but to accept. So he loses his son, sells his meager truck, and heads off to the arm-wrestling world championships in Vegas. I didn't know there WAS an arm-wrestling world championship, but no matter. Lincoln enters as pretty much an unknown, and bets $7,000 on himself with 20:1 odds.
Soon after entering the contest, we hear a broadcaster announce that each contestant can lose once and still have a second chance, and immediately the rest of the movie is spelled out with such clarity that you may notice a distinct sense of deja-vu permeating the rest of the film.
I love the other arm-wrestlers, by the way. They are belligerent, mindless morons who are more like apes than men. Professional wrestlers were hired for the movie, but someone should have told them that they are not doing the soap opera of professional wrestling in this movie, and that maybe they could act a little more human than they are used to.
Nope, not in this movie! We get interviews with some of them where they say things like "My whole body is an engine, and this here's the fireplug. And I'm gonna light him up!" Interesting thoughts, you knob. Others just scream and roar at each other like hyenas, but not Lincoln, he calmly gets on camera and he's not really in it for the money, he just really needs the brand new semi-truck that they're giving away to the winner.
I appreciate that it really gets you to root for him, but a LITTLE bit of realism wouldn't have hurt either. Grandpa, for example, comes back at one point and offers Lincoln a brand new truck with a full-sized trailer AND $500,000 in cash just to quit the contest. What is that? Lincoln must surely have done something much worse than drive through the man's front yard for him to make an offer like that just to get Lincoln out of Michaels' life, but we're left to wonder what that might have been.
The biggest problem is that it's just a little too obvious that the movie is a spin-off of the character of Rocky Balboa, with his charm and honesty at war with the vicious world around him. Here, Lincoln is just a simple man wanting to bring his family back together, and the cruel world doing everything possible to keep them apart. The arm-wrestling competition, and particularly the grand prize, was just a little too tailor-made for Lincoln's particular needs.
Overall the movie is about genuine repentance after a terrible mistake, and it delivers the message well and it's even a pretty fun ride for a lot of the time, but while the cheese factor is often the best part of a movie like this, here it is just a little too much for the movie to be good and not quite enough for the movie to be fun.