With Jennifer Lopez, it's a refusal of interiority, with Sydney Sweeney its reliance on physical traits. With Vin Diesel it's one-dimensionality, and when it comes to Sylvester Stallone, it's pure blandness. An unwillingness to modulate, to let the character reshape how he inhabits space. What's interesting is that Stallone does exactly what people accuse Arnold Schwarzenegger of doing: taking on a variety of roles across different genres only to bring nothing but one-dimensionality to all of them. The difference is that Schwarzenegger eventually embraced the limitation and found a niche where it worked perfectly. But Stallone keeps insisting he's doing something more ambitious while delivering the same mumbled earnestness, physical posturing, and emotional template regardless of context. He mostly gets away with it not necessarily due to audience goodwill, but because his limitations are camouflaged by the prestige of the film surrounding him. #videoessay #movieknowledge
