The Underrated Gem That Sylvester Stallone Says Nearly Ended His Hollywood Career

Sylvester Stallone's run as one of the action gods of American cinema appeared to be drawing to a close in the mid 1990s, as he watched the big-budget likes of "Judge Dredd," "Assassins," and "Daylight" flop with critics and fall short of box office expectations. The whole decade could've been a wash for Stallone had it not been for his 1993 comeback with "Cliffhanger" and "Demolition Man." Otherwise, the release of a new mainstream Sly flick was greeted with yawns at best.

So, when Stallone was offered the role of Freddy Heflin in James Mangold's "Cop Land" (against the director's initial wishes), the doughy sheriff of a New Jersey town where corrupt NYPD officers (led by Harvey Keitel's Lieutenant Ray Donlan) have taken up residence to crime it up with relative impunity (due to a legal loophole), the star dropped his $20 million asking price and joined the project. The half-deaf Heflin has become a shell of a man after falling short of his dream to become a New York City police officer, so he looks the other way as Donlan and his men literally get away with murder.

This all begins to weigh too heavily on Heflin's conscience, so he begins to investigate the crew's myriad crimes, at which point you have a moody underdog drama tailor made for Stallone. Critics were generally impressed with Sly's performance, but the Miramax release failed to generate awards buzz. "Cop Land" did respectable box office, but it was far from a hit, which further damaged Stallone's already fading Hollywood reputation. According to Stallone, it was nearly the end of the road for him in the movie business.

In an interview with AARP, Stallone said that he put on 40 pounds so as to separate Heflin from his usual musclebound protagonists. It was his finest performance since Ted Kotcheff's "First Blood," but Miramax hurt the film's prestige prospects by releasing it in mid-August of 1997, ahead of the late-summer film festivals that typically kick awards season into hyperdrive.

We'll never know if "Cop Land," a very good cop drama with terrific turns from acting heavyweights like Keitel, Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta, would've left a deeper imprint on the culture had it been released in the early fall, but, thanks to Stallone, we do know that the film was a disaster for him professionally. As he told AARP:

"Nobody wanted me after 'Cop Land.' Even my agents. I was fired from CAA. My personal manager at the time let me go. He said, 'I can't do anything for you. Nobody really wants you anymore.' And I go, 'How'd this happen?' I was told these studios feel as though you're not what you were. Time has passed. Your genre is over. For almost a decade, I couldn't find work. My former agent, Ron Meyer, was running Universal Studios. And I would go in and say, 'Please, I'll take anything.' He goes, 'I'll try to help you, but it's not up to me.' And that was it."

Stallone's not exaggerating. After "Get Carter" and "Driven" tanked, he starred in "D-Tox" and "Avenging Angelo," which were so awful they went direct to DVD in the U.S. He didn't get off the ropes until he scored with the nostalgia-driven franchise revivals "Rocky Balboa" and "Rambo." Stallone's now a semi-reliable star with a popular TV show ("Tulsa King"), but he hasn't done anything like "Cop Land" in almost 30 years.