With a career spanning 46 years, the late Roger Ebert was one of the most famous and influential film critics who ever put his pen to paper. For his work at the Chicago Sun-Times, Ebert won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism – the first film critic to ever do so. A master of astute and incisive prose, Ebert became as well-known for his pans as well as his raves. So well-known, in fact, that multiple books (with memorable titles like “A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length” and “Your Movie Sucks”) have been published solely to collect his negative reviews.
One of Ebert’s most scathing reviews belongs to an abysmal action film starring Sylvester Stallone: “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.” Directed by Roger Spottiswoode and released in 1992, the film paired Stallone — much more famous for the Rocky Balboa movies – with petite “Golden Girls” star Estelle Getty in one of the strangest buddy cop movies ever filmed. Stallone plays LAPD Sergeant Joe Bomowski, whose life is suddenly thrown into chaos when his overbearing mother Tutti (Getty) visits him from New Jersey. Tutti tries to buy Joe a new machine gun, inadvertently witnessing a murder in the process; now it’s up to the bickering mother and son to solve the crime. In his half-star review written on the Roger Ebert blog, Ebert called the film “one of those movies so dimwitted, so utterly lacking in even the smallest morsel of redeeming value, that you stare at the screen in stunned disbelief.” And that was only his first sentence. Unfortunately, the movie gets much worse from there.
Ebert hated one scene in particular
Ostensibly a comedy, “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot” is a movie that is only as funny as its title. Which is to say, not very funny. The film suffers from embarrassingly unfunny scenes such as Tutti saying “Go ahead, make my bed” in her worst Clint Eastwood impersonation, or Joe having a nightmare where he arrives to a shootout wearing a diaper. But in his Chicago Sun-Times review, Roger Ebert singled out one scene as being in particularly bad taste.
Joe and Tutti meet up with the police as they attempt to help a disturbed young man (Nicholas Sadler) standing on the ledge of a tall building. As Joe gets out on the ledge to talk to him, Tutti, who has learned of the young man’s troubles with his mother, inexplicably acquires a megaphone to give him motherly advice. Witnessing Joe’s aggravated embarrassment as Tutti shows the crowd his baby pictures, the man decides his problems are not so bad after all. He goes back into the building, telling the police officers that “[Joe] needs help.” Ebert notes that plenty of comedic movies also show similar scenes with cops attempting to coax men off of ledges, but “the ledge scene in ‘Stop!’ is the most unwound, phoned-in, contrived version of this situation I have ever seen. There is no spark at all” (via Roger Ebert).
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.
Ebert also panned these Stallone bombs
Despite the disdain dripping from every paragraph, Roger Ebert’s review of “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot” acknowledges that “Stallone is a capable comic actor.” Ebert later included Stallone’s legendary boxer film “Rocky” in his online “Great Movies” column, comparing him to a young Marlon Brando –- so he can’t be accused of simply having his knives out for the future “Tulsa King” star. But “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot” isn’t the only Stallone film that Ebert cut down to size.
Take “Death Race 2000,” a cult classic from 1975 co-starring Stallone as the race car driver Machine Gun Joe. Disgusted by the onscreen violence and the young audience’s exuberant reaction, Ebert wrote that he was tempted to walk out immediately. Ebert was also left bewildered by the 1984 bomb “Rhinestone,” which tried to sell Stallone as a country singer alongside Dolly Parton. Stallone’s overacting in the film was “embarrassing,” according to Ebert, and he proclaimed that Stallone and Parton’s sex scene was “so tame that Miss Piggy goes further with Kermit” (via Roger Ebert).
But “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot” ultimately takes the bad movie cake, and Ebert concludes by mourning the wastes of Stallone’s and Getty’s talents. Ebert wrote, “Here they seem trapped in every actor’s nightmare, a movie that was filmed before it was written.” Other critics agreed; the film languishes with a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and over thirty years after its release, it is still considered one of the worst-ranking Sylvester Stallone movies.