Sylvester Stallone made a career out of playing “action heroes” who tended to be all muscle and little brain… or at least that’s the stereotype. A lot of his characters and movies *seemed* like that on the surface, but were very different underneath. “Rocky” is often thought of as a boxing movie, but it’s really a love story with some boxing thrown in. “First Blood” is thought of as a simple shoot-em-up, but it’s really a story about how society threw away a whole generation of veterans… that monologue at the end *utterly* makes the movie. And “Demolition Man” seems another simple shoot-em-up with sci-fi trappings, but it’s a reasonably deep commentary on political correctness. And the man, when he had the right material, could *act.*
Stallone himself seems to be a pretty smart guy. This comes across *brilliantly* in this clip from a BBC interview from 1977:
A more complete version of the interview: