rated R

Nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be. Watching writer/director/star Sly Stallone’s latest stab at reinvigorating the lost art of 1980s-style testosterone-injected guns-n-glory action pictures is, to be fair, nearly as entertaining as the pictures it emulates. Which, if you’ve seen movies like “Commando,” “Cobra” or “Red Scorpion,” unfortunately, isn’t really saying all that much. Undoubtedly, the genre enjoyed a certain brand of stupefying punch-drunk charm, but these types of films swaggered their way into self-parody before Reagan was out of office, and have not weathered particularly well.

Looking back on the remarkably low bars they set for acting, dialogue, thought and common sense, the mind boggles to figure out why anyone, especially someone who managed to live through it the first time with his career more or less intact, would bother going back to that well. But, what do you know? Here comes Grampa, and he’s got on his old uniform again.  

rated PG-13

You are in a dark, cavernous space, surrounded by strange people that you don't know or recognize. You are all fixated on a single radiant wall, an expanse of pure light, which appears to flicker and shift and swim before you. You have the impression that there's a strong force looking back out at you, reaching into you, planting thoughts and images and ideas directly into your defenseless mind. More disconcerting than the conceit, the gall, the intimacy of this violation, is that the presence behind the light actually speaks to you, explaining through its projections, with startling specificity, exactly what’s it’s doing. Its statement is both blunt and circular, “I am deceiving you.”