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If you’re obsessed with the automatic shotgun Terry Crews brandished in “The Expendables” (I certainly am! Who isn’t?!!!) you might have some use for the thoroughly so-so “Alarum” (available in select theaters including VIP Legacy 9 in Greenfield, Ind. and on VOD beginning Friday, Jan. 17) as there’s not one but two of ‘em proudly on display here.
Joe (Scott Eastwood) and Lara (Willa Fitzgerald) are a pair of spies working for competing agencies who retire from their respective roles in order to marry one another. Their marital bliss gets disrupted when a plane carrying a hard drive crash lands at the wintry resort where they’re holidaying. The evil Orlin (Mike Colter) and his minions are the ones who downed the aircraft in hopes of procuring this McGuffin. Chester (Sylvester Stallone) is sent to the site by Director Burbridge (D.W. Moffett) to exterminate Joe and Lara just in case either of them went rogue.
“Alarum” as directed by Michael Polish (he’s half of the twin indie filmmaking duo the Polish brothers) and scripted by Alexander Vesha (he previously penned the 2010 Sean Patrick Flanery/Joe Pantoliano vehicle “Deadly Impact” directed by Robert Kurtzman (he’s the ‘K’ in the famed KNB EFX Group) and an episode of the Scott Caan Fox series “Alert: Missing Persons Unit”) is fairly boilerplate stuff. Some it works. A lot of it doesn’t.
The movie sports a fairly impressive cast most of whom come to play despite largely being better than the material itself.
Eastwood really came into his own as an actor four or five years ago playing hero in Rod Lurie’s “The Outpost” and heel in Guy Ritchie’s “Wrath of Man.” He hasn’t had nearly as much of a chance to shine since and “Alarum” really doesn’t afford him one. Fitzgerald wowed last year in the awesome and underrated “Strange Darling” (my review here) and she further impresses with her physical prowess here, but this probably wasn’t her best next career move. It seems as if she’s moving backward as opposed to forward. I wanted to see Eastwood and Fitzgerald’s characters interact more, but they’re separated as quickly as the story will permit.
Stallone is Stallone and he’s perfectly fine, though he’s saddled with what’s arguably the worst expository dialogue. Moffett convincingly plays a sleazy suit, which he’s done countless times before in his long and storied career.
Colter is a talented actor – I dug him as Luke Cage on the Netflix series of the same name and in the Gerard Butler action-thriller “Plane” – but he’s not good here. His accent is bad and comes and goes. Colter laughably does much of his acting through cigarettes, which he unconvincingly smokes.
The action alternates between impressive and inane. That automatic shotgun I wrote about earlier definitely fires at a range it absolutely couldn’t. Drone explosions look like they were torn from a “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” episode from the 1990s.
At the end of the day “Alarum” is mostly hokum.