I went into Alarum thinking, perhaps out of misplaced optimism, or just that basic human longing for improvement, that it has to be better than Armor, the last shitty Randal Emmett movie with Stallone. But you know what? It's not! If cinema is meant to offer us hope and reinvention, here is a sequel in spirit, though not in name, that squanders even that. To its defence, Alarum brings a few new weak spots to the autopsy table, but much of the decay is depressingly familiar.
Let’s scrape for the positives, though: the cast, at least on paper, has a certain beef-jerky gravitas. Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald are practically performing emergency surgery on the script, working so valiantly to elevate a mess that should by all rights be declared a disaster area. Fitzgerald, in particular, sweats for her paycheck, selling the kind of indestructibility (stabbed in the stomach, up and running before the popcorn cools) that belongs to Terminators, not newlyweds. Mike Colter, stoical and sturdy, does his best amidst the rubble. And then there’s Stallone—the man himself—doing what can only be described as professional sleepwalking, his performance the cinematic equivalent of direct deposit: as long as there is money to be made, why break a sweat?
Alarum aches to be an engaging spy story but fails spectacularly on every front that might define even a workmanlike thriller. You spend thirty minutes in a haze, unsure which company, or, for that matter, which reality, any of these glum mannequins represent. Did anyone here want to shoot this movie any better? The action is remarkable only in how little it quickens the pulse; a barrage of listless, impact-free gunfire, capped off with digital muzzle flashes that look like early-2000s PowerPoint transitions. It’s not just ugly, it's creatively bankrupt, with the story and visuals seemingly in a race to the bottom.
The film’s technical failings are all-pervasive, its visual style so unlovely as to become an anti-style: the opening credits are ugly, the lighting and color grading are all bruised gray and jaundiced beige, editing so choppy you half-expect the film to swap genres out of boredom. If ever a film seemed proud of looking unwatchable, this is it.
By the time Alarum limps to its conclusion, already teasing a sequel, as if hostage-taking were now a production value, you have the sense not of having watched a failed film, but of having survived an indifferent corporate product. There’s a feeling that the people behind the camera and in front of it (everyone but perhaps Fitzgerald, giving her battered all) simply didn’t care. What’s left is a kind of cinematic landfill, actors plodding through a story that’s both complicated and numbing, hoping the next project might be, at the very least, mercifully brief.
You expect the film to fail, not just financially but existentially; it’s not even trashy enough to build a cult. Stallone, please, stop mortgaging your history for these half-hearted exercises in action-movie necromancy. You were a great actor, not just a name on a grimy check stub.
As for Alarum itself, it is the worst movie Sylvester Stallone has ever been in. In every category, plot, directing, scenario, simple plausibility, it’s weak. You sense that it isn’t just commercial but anti-cinematic, never even trying to keep you watching, let alone listening. My advice: Don’t waste your time, and if there must be a sequel, may it play to empty seats.
