Over the Top (1987)

November 2, 2024 3:53 AM

Sylvester Stallone stars as hard-luck big-rig trucker Lincoln Hawk and takes us under the glaring Las Vegas lights for all the boisterous action of the World Armwrestling Championship. Relying on wits and willpower, Hawk tries to rebuild his life by capturing the first-place prize money, and the love of the son he abandoned years earlier into the keeping of his rich, ruthless father-in-law.
posted by Literaryhero (10 comments total)

We've all needed to win an arm wrestling tournament in order to rekindle a relationship with our estranged son at some point in our lives, haven't we? It's basically a universal truth.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:55 AM on November 2 [7 favorites]

My wife and I were debating whether the writers meant the title to be ironic. On one level, it’s such a weirdly innocent movie. The story is like something a 12 year old boy with an absentee father would tell. All the little details like the arm exercise device in the truck, that guy who drinks motor oil, and switching up the grip to win are so cheesy. But, they are exactly the kinds of things that would have been so cool to me as a kid in the eighties.
posted by chrisulonic at 6:25 AM on November 2 [6 favorites]

I never saw this movie, but I do remember that it was flopping brutally on first release, so much so that it was a major news story and focus of late night talk show humor. In the absence of good reviews from critics, the film's producers crafted in an intense ad campaign (that surely cost a fortune) that showed real people being interviewed after screenings of the film, sharing their unbridled and I'm sure very real enthusiasm for it. One meatheaded dude mumbled out, "It's the ultimate!!" (which was more like, "'S da ultimuh!!!"), which was a boundless source of hilarity to me as a young teen, and which I was often known to say of things that were not, in fact, the ultimate.

I'm not sure why the film's failure was such a huge story; people didn't talk about stuff like that then the way they do today. But Stallone was a big deal, while simultaneously being kind of a joke. And it also must have seemed like an incredibly stupid premise for a movie.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:48 AM on November 2 [2 favorites]

I remember part of the final prize being a new semi, and even as tween noting that before the final competition when they're doing contestant interviews about how they plan on winning in front of the semi that there was a stylized hawk painted on the side. Like gee, maybe the guy named Hawk is going to win, I don't know. Wikipedia only mentions a semi as part of an attempt to buy Hawk off.
posted by LionIndex at 9:16 AM on November 2

I do occasionally use the phrase "BREAK YOUR ARM LITTLE MAN!"
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 9:18 AM on November 2

I tagged this as an attempt of Stallone's to get back to the working-class blues aspect of the first Rocky movie, which in a way seems to have been the theme of every Rocky movie since II. (I'm guessing at the latter ones because IV was the last one I watched.) The problem with this one is that a) he's pretty jacked for someone who lives on the road and only has body weight exercises to stay in shape (see also: First Blood), and b) his character is named Lincoln Hawk, which is just short of calling the character Eagle Washington. Well, at least it's got a halfway-decent soundtrack and plenty of real armwrestlers.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:41 AM on November 2 [2 favorites]

This was the crown jewel of Cannon films, before Globus and Golan split to make competing lambada movies.

This might have been an FPP back in the day, but gives a backstory to it all.

TLDR: Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo walked so Over The Top could arm wrestle.
posted by lkc at 1:06 PM on November 2 [3 favorites]

I was 9 when this movie came out, and there is nothing that could ever make me think this movie is anything less than amazing.
posted by Literaryhero at 8:18 PM on November 2 [4 favorites]

This Aged Great
posted by eustatic at 5:06 PM on November 3

If you like this movie, you'll also like Real Steel, because IT'S VERY MUCH NEARLY THE SAME EXACT MOVIE.
posted by Wild_Eep at 1:53 PM on November 5 [2 favorites]