3 hours ago
5
Back at the beginning of the second Trump administration (which feels like the Jurassic era now), the president named Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight “special ambassadors to a great but troubled place, Hollywood, California.” No one seems to be quite sure what these ambassadorships entail or if any of that troika of right-wing fellow travellers have fulfilled any official duties. But on the evidence of this, Stallone is already letting the side down – by making a film so bad it shames American cinema itself. And it wasn’t even made in Hollywood! Instead, it was shot in Ohio (pretending, deeply unconvincingly, to be Poland), making this what’s called a runaway production, the phenomenon that is undermining Hollywood’s film-making industry.
However, this cheapola would-be spy thriller is bad all on its own, whatever its politics. The idea is that secret agents Joe (Scott Eastwood) and his supposed antagonist Lara (Willa Fitzgerald) meet-cute in Prague (the real thing, shown in what looks suspiciously like stock aerial footage) while trying to kill each other, but instead they fall in love and get married. Five years later, Joe has seemingly retired from the spy business, but Lara is still working for an independent, territorially unattached agency called Alarum who supply her with what looks like a fancy pager to communicate with headquarters.
Joe and Lara are near Gdańsk (the Ohio version) on holiday when a small aircraft falls out of the sky. Joe does a quick field autopsy to remove a thumb drive from one of the dead pilots, and soon a whole bunch of “Polish” soldiers led by Orlin (Mike Colter) descend on the area, shooting everything in sight. Separated from Lara, Joe makes his way to a town where he meets Chester (Stallone), a former colleague of Joe’s so grizzled he can barely move the muscles in his face; Chester pretends to be friendly but is secretly packing syringes full of deadly toxins. And, of course, he also has lots of guns.
The film-makers at least paid up for a visual effect that created a small cloud of blood that poofs into the air, dainty as a mushroom spreading spores, whenever anyone got shot, which is often. The hand-to-hand combat sequences are even less convincing, featuring as they do a legion of disposable extras, their faces mostly masked so you can’t tell if it’s the same half-dozen people. Meanwhile, DW Moffett holds court in an empty warehouse as the agency director, and has explicatory conversations with his minions or answers the phone to growl at Joe or Chester. Even the quips are dismal.
