Alarum: Sylvester Stallone guest-stars in an action film navigating mediocrity

Joe and Lara are two elite spies, once rivals, who fell in love during a mission where she was supposed to kill him. Now lovers on the run from their respective intelligence agencies, five years after the fateful love-at-first-sight and subsequent romantic idyll, they see it interrupted by the most absurd of incidents.

An ultralight plane crashes near their winter hideout, leaving as its only trace a hard drive of inestimable value, a digital Pandora's Box coveted by every secret organization on the planet. Thus begins a manhunt against them, forcing them to re-embrace that violent past with which they hoped to have definitively settled scores. Suspected of having joined Alarum, a secret sect, they find themselves dealing with several unleashed assassins sent after them, including the seasoned and infallible Chester, a hired "big shot" from the CIA.

Alarum: or how stars age

The action icons of the past confront the weight of time, transforming the scars of their bodies and their cinematic history into a perennial attempt to reinvent themselves. But if The Expendables saga, especially in its early chapters, managed to capture the moods and tastes of the general public, ready to approach the heroes of youth with a nostalgic fervor, unfortunately most contemporary themed productions standardize on a B-movie soul - or worse - often unintentionally tragicomic, and this Alarum is no exception.

A new exclusive to the Amazon Prime Video catalog, the film features the participation of a bloated and tired Sylvester Stallone in the role of nemesis / guest-star, with the main roles entrusted instead to the artist's son Scott Eastwood and the blonde Willa Fitzgerald.

A confused and convoluted script, accompanied by very poor staging - the budget must have been at an all-time low - which relentlessly multiplies twists and betrayals, to the point of losing all internal coherence, making it almost impossible for the viewer to navigate a web of secret agencies and agents with very dubious or unclear interests.

A film without art or part

Discontinuous action sequences lacking a clear vision, with Michael Polish's direction seeming to proceed with tired inertia, amidst improvised gunfights and hand-to-hand combat where it is primarily Lara's character who delivers the beatings. The management of locations is exploited with apathy, whether it's sparse woodland or an urban context, to the point that the fact that the filming took place in Ohio is completely irrelevant for logistical purposes. The operation then risks taking an unintentionally ridiculous turn in the construction of the relationship between Chester and Joe, in the name of a respect that nonetheless doesn't prevent low blows, only to resolve in a "happy ending" that is nothing short of embarrassing.

The script unnecessarily complicates itself when the plot is actually relatively simple, without also giving due weight to the romantic relationship between the two protagonists, who for most of the runtime are far from each other, busy facing their respective adversaries. Alarum at least has the "merit" of immediately showing its derivative and low-budget essence, allowing the viewer to press the stop button on the remote control before it's too late.