SLY'S NEXT MOVE

By RICHARD CORLISS

He looks bloated, and his face wears defeat as its due. The sheriff of a Jersey suburb overrun by venal New York City cops, he is seen as a genial buffoon. Even the metallic voice of a video game tells him, "You have no authority." He seems almost at ease with his fate--one of those rare men who don't dare to dream or think of themselves as hero material. Imagine an older Rocky Balboa who got clobbered until he was half deaf, and whose Adrian dumped him to marry the town scumball.

His name is Freddy Heflin, and in Cop Land--a sharp-eyed character study and virtuoso acting class masquerading as a violent melodrama--he is played by Sylvester Stallone. This time Hollywood's longest lived action star is not battling Apollo Creed or the Vietnamese or a killer mountain, but his own rep as a stolid, vaguely comic, pre-Modernist hunk-lunk. Freddy is surrounded by guys who think they're men because they carry guns in the big city. But Sly is crowded too--by an intimidating gang of quality thesps, including Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta. They've been doing the heavy acting while he's been out destroying the world in order to save it.

At 51, Stallone wants to save himself. His forays into farce (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) and romance (remember Rhinestone?) were low-level disasters. His recent action films have been box-office duds at home, though usually robust moneymakers abroad; last year's Daylight earned only $33 million in North America but $120 million elsewhere, making Sly a pricey export commodity. "He epitomizes the state our industry is in," says Daylight director Rob Cohen. "With Rocky he proved a $1 million film could be a big hit. Now we want to make movies for the global market, but how do we get global and still keep the domestic audience?"

Stallone can worry about that and so many other things; he's a mess of anxieties. "I have an inability to feel validated," he confesses. "There's a persistent hunger, which is disconcerting and sometimes debilitating. You ask yourself when can you sit back and not have anything to prove? But I do have something to prove." Daylight hardly prepared him for the promise and threat of Cop Land. "I didn't know if I had developed enough bad habits to not work with good actors again," he says. "If you don't deliver, they can't morph good acting. I felt the way Michael Jordan must have felt when he went to play baseball."

The rookie does fine. He leaves the plot propulsion to the Scorsese grads--Keitel as a mob-controlled cop covering up a killing, De Niro as a flinty internal-affairs detective on Keitel's trail, Liotta as a good-bad cop--while he watches, listens, recedes into the wallpaper. Mining his own insecurity to mirror Freddy's, Stallone dominates these scenes with his poignant passivity. The sweet sadness in his eyes reveals something rare in modern films: how much pain and insult a decent man with zero self-esteem can endure. Of course, he and we know he's the hero who, at the end, will bust out of his emotional lethargy; the soft Rocky will become the battering Rambo. But for a star of Stallone's gaudy wattage, the attitude is bold, subtle and, he hopes, redefining.

Cop Land scans like an Eastern Western: High Noon without the clock, or a Shane in which the hero is the homesteader (played by Van Heflin, whose name has an echo in Freddy's). "I wanted to make a simple morality play," says James Mangold, 33, the writer-director whose only previous feature was the low-budget love story Heavy but who manages the complex story and big-name cast with a veteran's assurance. Mangold grew up in a blue-collar town near West Point, up the Hudson from the film's fictional Garrison, N.J. It was filled with "cops and firemen who commuted to the city. They saw the suburbs as a new frontier where you could build a '50s-style American dream. I thought about settlers--the sense of starting again, which is the basis of the Western."

In a lineup of high profiles, Liotta has the toughest role and does wonders with it. He gets to play ambiguities. Stallone has to dramatize indecision; he does it by carefully plodding toward Freddy's crisis. He describes the sheriff as "a noble turtle," and during the shoot he kept a small turtle in his pocket. Mangold wanted the star to lose his chiseled look, so Stallone gained 40 lbs. of flab--a condition he often felt obliged to explain. "He'd say, 'Hey, I'm doing a movie, that's why I'm heavy,'" Liotta recalls. "He'd say this to a perfect stranger." Sly's first words to Annabella Sciorra, the younger, more alluring Talia Shire type who plays his lost love, were, "Hi, I'm not usually this fat."

Stallone has long been underestimated because of his thick speech and droopy demeanor. But his Cop Land colleagues speak of him with fond admiration. "Sly's a smart guy," Mangold attests. "He has a strong script instinct about how to hit the important beats of the scene." Stallone also knew how the film could help him. "Sly wanted to be with other real actors and feel alive in a dramatic scene," Mangold says. "I think this was not so much a career move for Sly as a personal decision to want to feel the joy of making a film. To be passionate about something again."

Not that Stallone doesn't love action films. He sees them as an updating of "the great mythological tales; we just changed the wardrobe a bit." Rambo was the prototype of the one-man-army film. "Yeah," he says with a laugh, "I strapped on the old covered wagon and pulled it across the plains of inventiveness." (He'll probably do another Rambo.) But he admits that some roles he "phoned in--and there's nothing more pathetic than to be complacent in the arts." He has long wanted to do a film "that will be remembered for more than just me flexing."

He has changed agents three times in three years, partly because he thought he was losing out on meaty roles. "At Creative Artists Agency I was the action specialist; maybe I was also a bit lax and just became a gun for hire. Meanwhile Michael Douglas was getting these incredible parts: Basic Instinct, Falling Down. When I saw Al Pacino do Scent of a Woman--I would've killed for a role like that. The Usual Suspects? I would have been there in a second. People don't think of me in those terms. Maybe after this, they will."

Married in May to his longtime live-in, Jennifer Flavin, and tiptoeing toward modern maturity, Stallone still feels he can do it forever--"as long as I don't push the gullibility of the audience by running around in a tank top when I'm 78. Doing uber-action at that age can be difficult, but Sean Connery has shown how action roles can be tempered with a bit of wisdom. Besides, I don't think I have the ability to manage eternal leisure."

Sly will manage fine. Like Freddy, he can take the heat. Like Rocky, he's a fighter with heart. And like Rambo, he keeps coming back.

--Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles