Over the Top (1987)

Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk, a father who's been estranged from his ten-year-old son (David Mendenhall) for the boy's entire life. The kid is a US military school brat, bordering on insufferable when we first meet him. At the behest of the youth's mother, Hawk spends time with the kid, hoping to get to know him during a lengthy truck ride across states. Trouble comes from the boy's overbearing grandfather, who wants trucker Hawk out of the picture.
It's a pretty clichéd story of an absent father who has to fight to knock down the walls of his child's preconceived notions and feelings of abandonment, and the bonding can be disappointingly mawkish at times, but it has the charm of a 1980's VHS rental, and I have a fondness for that kind of thing, When in Vegas it tries to be the Rocky of arm wrestling, and it does a half-decent job at it. I was inwardly (but assuredly) cheering for pops during the finale.

3 shoulder pillows out of 5