Mission Alarum (plain old Alarum outside the UK) landed on Prime Video this week, to apparent popular appeal. Well, lots of people watched it – enough for it to take the platform’s most-watched spot. Those viewers didn’t necessarily like it, though: as we’ve covered before, the film has achieved a rare 0% rating on rottentomatoes.
So that must mean it’s so bad it’s good, right? Right? It’s got Sly Stallone, he’s done loads of great films, and Scott Eastwood! His dad Clint has done loads of great films! And Willa Fitzgerald – she was in Strange Darling, and that really was good.
Mission Alarum, alas, is not so bad it’s good.
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User reviews include: “Oh boy, this is a disaster”, “Do not waste time no matter how bored you are”, and – our personal favourite – “I feel intellectually violated.”
So we got stuck in ourselves to see if it was as bad as they said. Here’s what we found:
Lionsgate
Literally the opening scene
Scott EastWood, in his tux (Why? We may never know) is mysteriously shot through a window. He collapses, bleeding. A guy breaks in and boom, up jumps the injured Eastwood and grapples with the would-be assassin before swiftly dispatching him.
But wait, there’s another one, and she’s a girl! They beat the crap out of each other before tumbling through a window and landing on a car two storeys below. They then flirt because a recently broken nose and a gunshot wound are super hot.
And also the guns
These days, for unfunny reasons, it’s common for movie productions to use fake guns and have the actors mime recoil instead of using blanks. But if you’re going to do that, you have to make sure your effects budget makes a shotgun blast look like a shotgun and not a white flash with a gentle puff of pipe-smoke superimposed over it.
Amazon//Lionsgate
And also the tech
Willa Fitzgerald’s character checks a secret comms device she has hidden inside her hairdryer. The message comes through character by character like wi-fi isn’t a thing, and the typeface is straight out of a pre-Matrix cyberpunk thriller from 1995. So futuristic!
If the excuse for using this nonsense device instead of a smartphone is that it needs to be encrypted and secret and blah blah blah, we would direct the jury to exhibit A: WhatsApp. Even government ministers use it these days.
And also the plot
15 minutes in, we still had no idea who the leads were, what their relationship was to each other, who they worked for or what they were trying to achieve.
Amazon Prime Video//Lionsgate
The disregard of basic physics
An unseen killer shoots the pilot and co-pilot of a small plane. We know this because we see the gun, POV-style, go bang, leaving big red splatters across the cockpit. But while the blood is blown out the front of their heads, the bullets themselves stay put inside their skulls, because the glass doesn’t so much as creak, let alone shatter.
Misunderstanding weather
As the plane blows up off-screen, one character hears the boom, almost like thunder. “Is that hail?” she asks, having presumably confused her major weather conditions.
Amazon Prime//Lionsgate
It gets worse
Ambling through the woods, her group finally comes across the downed plane. The weather-confused woman looks lingeringly upon the wrecked propellers, wings and fuselage of what is clearly a downed plane not ten feet from her and asks the arguably redundant question: “What is it?”
Do you know what, that was all from the first 20 minutes. We have to stop now because life is short. We still haven’t seen Sly Stallone, learned what the film is about, what anyone wants or why it’s called Mission Alarum. We leave it to braver souls to find those answers.
Mission Alarum is available to stream on Prime Video.
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Editor, Digital Spy Chris has over 25 years’ experience as a writer and editor, having worked as a journalist covering TV and movies since the ’90s. Starting out as a TV listings editor at the Press Association, he was quickly hired by the nascent Heat magazine, where he rose to become Senior Editor, interviewing the likes of Simon Cowell, Boris Johnson and Paris Hilton. Over the years he has written about entertainment with clarity and wit for Heat, Elle, Q, The Telegraph and of course Digital Spy, and has served many times as a judge in the Royal Television Society awards. He has written and recorded a novelty single with Lord Lloyd-Webber, written scripts for the National TV Awards, made Noel Edmonds cry, accidentally punched an Inbetweener and stolen a small piece of rubble from the Battle of Hogwarts movie set. (They can’t have it back.) LinkedIn