Alarum, 2025.
Directed by Michael Polish.
Starring Scott Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Willa Fitzgerald, Mike Colter, D.W. Moffett, Isis Valverde, Anton Narinskiy, Patrick Millin, Joel Cohen, Bailey Edwards, Abigail Spear, Patrick Millin, Ken Strunk, and La Monde Byrd.
SYNOPSIS:
After the CIA discovers the whereabouts of two rogue spies, who have not only gone off-grid but have become husband and wife, all hell is unleashed on their winter honeymoon cabin resort in the woods by a consortium of international spy organizations who are after a ‘flight pill’, aka a hard drive, and all of whom suspect the two may have joined a network of rogue spies known as the Alarum.
While on some sort of assassination mission with vague details, spies Joe Travers (Scott Eastwood) and Laura (Willa Fitzgerald) cross paths in the mark’s hotel room, and in an even vaguer development, fall for one another while battling it out, working for rival intelligence agencies. It’s not fun, charming, sexy, believable, or well-choreographed. If nothing else, expectations are set for Alarum.
From director Michael Polish (a once somewhat promising filmmaker with tantalizing ideas and frequently backed by Sony Pictures Classics, now reduced to low-budget streaming prioritized action fare, with his most recent project being the problematic and panned Gina Carano-led Terror on the Prairie), the film then flashes forward to this couple married and on a wintery honeymoon, yet also working on another mark.
It’s challenging to write about Alarum from a plot perspective since the film is so muddled between government and global factions, bringing in several contract killers ranging from a sleepy Sylvester Stallone to a thick-accented, homicidal maniac Mike Colter (playing a character who starts killing his henchmen in frustration to drive home his heartlessly committed determination to his objective) alongside a MacGuffin thumb drive everyone is after, not to mention unclear motives surrounding the current mark, that all of this becomes an incoherent narrative jumble where it’s tough to get a read on the more specific motives of each character.
While gathering information on current mark Roland Rousseau (Joel Cohen), Joe, who has actually left this world behind and is only present on these missions working with his wife and supporting her work at the Alarum agency (they are apparently given more control over what jobs they take, all to function as a productive force in the world that serves no singular country), is instructed to go on a resort tour with Roland’s wife (Isis Valverde.)
What should have been an uneventful couple of hours turns dangerous when a helicopter crashes into the snowy terrain, soon followed by the arrival of an armed militia ordered around by Mike Colter’s fixer Orlin, fighting over possession of a flash drive discovered in the wreckage containing national secrets. The CIA’s Ronald Burbridge (D.W. Moffett) brings in legendary feared killer Chester (Sylvester Stallone sleepwalking through his lines and generally coming across actively disengaged with the material) to find the drive and find out if Joe jumped ship to Alarum before murdering him.
It’s a fool’s errand to describe what these intelligence agencies stand for, what the flash drive’s contents are, how it could impact the CIA or America, and what any of these agents are after even before the discovery of that drive. However, Alarum does have wall-to-wall action mixing in a variety of weapons (including some heavy artillery shotguns that make for some entertaining ragdoll physics) and the chance for young actors such as Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald to effectively audition for more intensely demanding action roles. Such shootouts are often visual blur as incoherently chaotic as the narrative, but at the very least, the sheer amount of bullets flying and hand-to-hand combat yields a minor amount of entertainment.
Still, this is a rough, disorganized, confounding story without any explosive set pieces to make the abundant action worthwhile and can’t even make the clichéd married spies premise fun. Alarum is also arguably a career low for Sylvester Stallone.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
