Given that the finale of Michael Polish’s spies-on-the-lam thriller, “Alarum,” teases the unwelcome possibility of a sequel, please consider this review a mercy killing.
Don’t be fooled by the poster: Sylvester Stallone might feature prominently, but we’ll wait almost 25 minutes to experience the soupçon of pleasure his world-weary assassin, Chester, provides. Until then, we’re stuck with the blandly boring Scott Eastwood, a bargain-bin Ryan Reynolds whose smarmy spy, Joe, exhibits all the personality of a spent bullet casing. Joe and his slinky German wife, Lara (Willa Fitzgerald) — a.k.a. “the best trained killer in the world,” per herself — have been rogue agents for five years, after a meet-cute while falling out of the same window. Now Joe is suspected of having joined the intelligence network known as Alarum and, accordingly, Chester has been tasked with his termination.
“Chester is messy,” a grumpy superior opines. Maybe, but he’s not as disordered as a script whose author common decency precludes me from naming. Traversing bleakly undifferentiated East European locations (the less said about the cinematography, the better), the bullet-riddled plot is a flavorless tossed salad of code names and cleaning crews, drone strikes and shootouts. This is the sort of movie where nondescript suits natter in gloomy rooms, and where a sapling-like beauty can inflict more damage than an M.M.A. fighter.
And while acting talent might be surplus to requirements, I was saddened to see the marvelous Mike Colter show up here as a supervillain who slaughters some of his own men to encourage obedience in their comrades. With any luck, Colter’s hot, tormented priest in the fabulously wicked series “Evil” (2019-24) is praying that the actor’s future contains much better movies than this.
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