Metacritic reviews

Cobra is a sleek, extremely violent and exciting police thriller.

Whereas Clint Eastwood simply would have squinted at Robinson, Stallone takes a more violent approach. Maybe that's the difference between actors--Eastwood can be droll; Stallone more often crosses the border to primeval.

A disturbing movie from many points of view: disturbing for the violence it portrays, the ideas it represents and the large number of people who will undoubtedly go to see it and cheer on its dangerous hero.

There is not nearly enough violence. No one is eviscerated. The villains, all mumblers to a man, are not punished by having their tongues cut out. The body count is only somewhere in the high eighties - and most of these are simply gunned down with a deplorable lack of invention. Very little is done by way of eye-gouging, limb-crushing or tooth-extraction.

It's fast-paced and full of gaudy action, yet it's thoroughly unsatisfying, largely because it's so lazy: once Stallone (also the screenwriter) and director George Pan Cosmatos have sketched out the standard genre archetypes, they leave it at that, not bothering to fill in the niceties of characterization, plausibility, motivation, and suspense.

Cobra looks and sounds as bad as it does because Stallone hired George P. Cosmatos (Rambo), a hack with no ideas, to direct, and because Stallone wrote the screenplay himself. No excuses: This movie is just the way the highest paid and hence most powerful man in Hollywood wanted it. You take a long look at the thing, you keep that in mind: This is the film he meant to make. [24 May 1986, p.D1]

Cobra's pretentious emptiness, its dumbness, its two-faced morality make it a movie that begs to be laughed off.

If this guy tripped over a print of "Citizen Kane," he not only wouldn't know what it was, he'd hit somebody over the head with it. [24 May 1986, p.C1]

Every aspect of this film is reprehensible. Stallone's character is an empty hulk; the few attempts to provide us with little insights into his character are downright laughable.