Cobra is not a good action film. Neither is it a good cop drama or a good buddy cop film. Cobra is something else. It is a testimonial of what the USA were about in the late Reagan era.
The film introduces us to Marion Cobretti, a cop with an attitude who won't respect the rules since they are made to protect the bandits, the killers and the rapists. He thinks that to fight those, he has to act like them.
That is how he gets into conflict with his boss, Monte who is presented as a liberal freak who'd rather let people get killed than to use violence on the evil men. In a particular scene, Cobretti and his colleague Gonzales are talking about how they'd like to punch a hole in this Monte's chest. They are half-joking about it but you still feel that those trigger-happy cops would pretty much be able to do it anytime if they felt like it.
That same Monte is also presented as the person responsible for hiring a traitor female cop and forcing Cobretti to work with her. The result of this is that Cobretti almost gets killed because of the left-wing tolerant attitude of this liberal superior.
At the end of the movie, Cobretti saves the day by using every technique he knows to exterminate his foes(shooting them, blow them up, put them on fire, etc.) and then goes to punch his liberal boss in the face.
What really fascinates me the most in this film is how those ideas were mainstream less than 20 years ago. How crowd were supposed to react positively to this final punch in the mouth making a statement that liberals were responsible for the rise of crime in our society.
The film introduces us to Marion Cobretti, a cop with an attitude who won't respect the rules since they are made to protect the bandits, the killers and the rapists. He thinks that to fight those, he has to act like them.
That is how he gets into conflict with his boss, Monte who is presented as a liberal freak who'd rather let people get killed than to use violence on the evil men. In a particular scene, Cobretti and his colleague Gonzales are talking about how they'd like to punch a hole in this Monte's chest. They are half-joking about it but you still feel that those trigger-happy cops would pretty much be able to do it anytime if they felt like it.
That same Monte is also presented as the person responsible for hiring a traitor female cop and forcing Cobretti to work with her. The result of this is that Cobretti almost gets killed because of the left-wing tolerant attitude of this liberal superior.
At the end of the movie, Cobretti saves the day by using every technique he knows to exterminate his foes(shooting them, blow them up, put them on fire, etc.) and then goes to punch his liberal boss in the face.
What really fascinates me the most in this film is how those ideas were mainstream less than 20 years ago. How crowd were supposed to react positively to this final punch in the mouth making a statement that liberals were responsible for the rise of crime in our society.