In keeping with last week’s Bad Movie Friday theme, we’re gonna once again focus on the thespian debut of a notorious athlete. In this case, our critical eye turns toward Brian Bosworth, the ex-Sooner star turned Bo Jackson doormat. Shortly after his pro football career came to an embarrassing end, Bosworth shifted gears and starred in the 1991 action vehicle Stone Cold, the first scene of which is posted above. To his credit, Bosworth is…not terrible, and certainly a good deal more of a natural in front of the camera than Double Team‘s Dennis Rodman. And has Lance Henriksen ever been anything less than scene-stealing when given a juicy bad-guy role? (Here he plays the wonderfully named “Chains Cooper,” leader of a white-supremacist biker gang in Mississippi.) But as you might have guessed, Stone Cold isn’t exactly classic cinema. As the Washington Post so neatly summed things up:
Most of “Stone Cold” is plain silly, regurgitated biker-film cliches underscored with awful hard rock cliches. To its minimal credit, things get wackily out of hand in the last 15 minutes, when the Brotherhood stages a full-scale assault on the Mississippi State Capitol. At this point the action becomes so preposterous that you’ll feel less cheated than you would otherwise, but “Stone Cold” is ultimately most likely to provoke another 22-year hiatus in major-studio biker-action films.
Terrible call on that prophecy, though. Because, for better or worse, biker films live.
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