Sly Stallone co-stars with some Scorsese alums in a failed prestige picture

Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: We recommend five days of action vehicles, each starring a different member of The Expendables.
Cop Land (1997)
Sylvester Stallone’s most recent of many career revivals has involved his reinvention as a geriatric action nostalgist, indulging in fantasy revivals and team-ups like Grudge Match and the Expendables series. One of his earlier comebacks took a more serious, less self-kidding route, dropping the actor into a bit of Weinstein-assisted, ostensible Oscar bait, 1997’s Cop Land. Nobody bit: The film got no awards attention and grossed little at the box office; Stallone was soon headlining action flops again. Nevertheless, the movie has aged better than many of the star’s more age-conscious image tweaks.
While Expendables rallies the ’80s-action troops (and a few younger counterparts), Cop Land places Stallone alongside a history of hotheaded Martin Scorsese leading men: Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, and Robert De Niro, all playing New York cops in one form or another. (Raging Bull’s Cathy Moriarty even turns up as a surly wife). This positions Stallone’s Freddy Heflin as an outsider. Freddy works as the sheriff of a small New Jersey town where a bunch of NYPD officers live, exploiting a transit-overtime loophole to reside outside of the city. Freddy yearns to join the NYPD but doesn’t meet the physical requirements—he’s deaf in one ear following a youthful act of heroism. The sheriff job is less demanding, as it mostly involves glad-handing the big-shot residents (led by Harvey Keitel) and making sure no one ever writes them speeding tickets. But when an altercation with two black teenagers ends with the apparent suicide of a hero policeman, an Internal Affairs investigator (De Niro) comes sniffing around the cop community, while another officer (Liotta) starts spilling his guts to Freddy.