Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992)

(In French, On TV, May 2019) Some titles live on in infamy—not necessarily the films, but the titles, and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot is way up there with the worst. It does sum up the film’s premise nicely, though, as Sylvester Stallone plays a super-cop who’s saddled with an overbearing mother who screws up his ongoing investigations. As a concept, it’s not the worst idea in the world: it could have worked as intended, as a take-off on the kind of buddy-cop movie that was so popular at the time. Alas, the execution is limp: predictable, unfunny, about as in-your-face as it could be. What’s more, it feels stuck in a weird borderland in between too dumb to be realistic, yet not absurd enough to fully play into the premise. Estelle Getty is not really to blame as the titular mom, but Stallone is not even up to his low standards here—although try to watch the film in French if you can, as his dubbing actor is marginally more competent at line reading than he is, and thus gives the impression that he’s a better actor. Not that it’s enough to rescue this film from easy punchlines and lapidary assessments—as a title, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot is awful, but it turns out that the movie is as well.