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.
