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.
 
The story he’s telling, in which a crack squad of old guard mercenaries deploy to decimate the regime of a third world drug czar while saving his noble daughter, could fit rather comfortably in a shot glass. But this is not a movie about story. It’s a movie about rippling muscles, heavy artillery, vehicular homicide, unanticipated amputations and gratuitous explosions of everything in sight. Put bluntly, it’s a movie about hopelessly arrested development and desperately unhinged male aggression.
 
As such things go, these are fairly steady targets, and Stallone certainly hits ’em dead in the eye. At 63 years, to his credit, Stallone appears still to be hammered from Pittsburg steel. If his writing, pacing or ability to coherently edit an action sequence were half as tight as his abs, his movie might have at least stood some chance, mindlessly thrown back as it is, at providing some entertainment.
 
As it stands, though, more often than not his gristly old gang hangs morosely around in bars and garages and tattoo shacks, chaffing on at length about faded egos and failed relationships and the halcyon days before their lifestyle choices left them all insolvent, lonely and obsolete. With a heavy emphasis on dizzying, overintimate closeups, Stallone probably hoped that he could rely on the craggy landscapes of their scarred old mugs to mask the fact that his casts' performances are as stale and one dimensional as the characters they portray. It's a losing battle. One might easily be convinced this ragtag wild bunch of chewed up warhorses were making up their lines as they went along, if it wasn’t for the distinct apprehension that they were reading Sly’s own autobiography off of cue cards the whole time. They would probably have seemed far more interesting, certainly far more convincing, if they’d just kept their fingers on the triggers and their mouths shut. Perhaps, if Stallone had considered cutting all the dialogue completely, the whole thing would have been far more engaging as history’s loudest silent film. Throw that on the pile of missed opportunities. 

Originally setting out to assemble a cast of vintage ’80s blockbuster elite, the brute squad Stallone finally managed to cobble together is a B-team at best. Having been turned away by both Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Segal (you’ve got to wonder if Sly had the grapes to even ask Chuck Norris), we’re forced to settle for Jason Statham (from both the “Crank” and “Transporter” franchises), Dolph Lundgren (“Rocky IV,” “The Punisher”), ex-wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, former NFL linebacker Terry Crews, martial arts marvel Jet Li (who throws down as hard as any of them, but sadly appears more like a hungover banker than a chopsocky superstar), and, oddly enough, Mickey Rourke. Pound for pound, the lineup does represent an impressive acre of sirloin, but despite very brief, and amusing, cameos by Bruce Willis and a doughy looking Ahnold (both apparently feeling charitable toward their old rival after all these years), only Lundgren, who still casts the shadow of a spruce tree, might even marginally be considered an ’80s action star.  It’s a little surprising that Lions Gate would bother throwing $70 million at this failed party.

Based on the moderate success Stallone managed to pound out of his explosively brutal re-visitation of “Rambo” a couple of years back, there appears to be some lingering appetite for such visceral, never-say-die fare. But whatever comment Stallone is trying to make, whether on the current state of action films (in which pencil-necks like Michael Cera and Shia Labouf are so improbably embraced by new audiences as adventuring leading man material), or on the fragile inner machinery that drives even the most bulldozing of men, there’s nothing here that wasn’t addressed with 10 times the grace, if you can believe it, in his previous “Rambo” Peckinpawloosa. What he’s given us here is ultimately just a big waste of ammunition. No Sly, they don’t make ’em like they used to. But there’s a reason for that: they weren’t that great to begin with.

Originally published in The Wire