ALARUM - Mark Reviews Movies

Alarum, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 16, 2025

Alarum puts so much effort into having a hard-edged attitude that no one appears to have thought about making the movie fun, coherent, or even worth looking at. A low-budget movie can appear cheap and get away with it with a certain level of charm, but there's little excuse for one looking and playing as ugly as this one.

The story, characters, and plotting are pretty ugly, too. The idea here is that there's a secret world of assassins, working for various agencies or companies and traveling the globe to kill seemingly random people and, apparently, mostly each other. Joe (Scott Eastwood), for example, is introduced on an assignment in Prague, where he is immediately shot by a sniper, kills one of the assassins trying to take him out for whatever reason, and fights another, before the two fall out a window and on top of a car. She's Laura (Willa Fitzgerald), and they lock eyes before Joe asks her out on a date.

Five years later, the now-married couple are allegedly in Poland, which suspiciously looks a lot like some small-town place in the United States and has a lot of noticeable signs in English. Joe and Laura are on the honeymoon at a nice resort, and she also seems to be on some kind of assignment to protect a man named Roland (Joel Cohen). Even the actors seem confused about what's happening here, if Cohen's bewildered performance, which comes across as mildly irritated about being targeted for murder, is any indication.

Indeed, the entire plot of Alexander Vesha's screenplay seems more coincidental than anything. A plane crashes nearby while Joe and some other guests are on a walking tour of the woods, and sure enough, both pilots were killed by gunshots before the plane crashed (The characters have a weird grudge or outright vendetta against those who man aerial vehicles, since another character poisons a helicopter pilot later). Joe somehow guesses that one of the pilots must have swallowed something important before being shot. It's a good thing he rightly deduces both that and which pilot actually did ingest a flash drive before suddenly being murdered, or him gutting a man in front of shockingly calm onlookers would have been for nothing.

Eventually, several people want to kill Joe and, once they realize she's also at the resort, Laura. They include Orlin (Mike Coulter), the killer of the pilots and an assassin for presumably a rival assassination operation, and Joe's former boss Burbidge (D.W. Moffett), who sits behind a desk in an anonymous warehouse-looking building trying to figure out what the hell is going on, too. Burbidge rings up yet another assassin named Chester, played by Sylvester Stallone with the relaxed comfort of an actor who knows the check has cleared.

Joe and Chester eventually team up, with the latter still ordered to kill his old partner in murder-for-hire and the former somehow forgetting that fact. Meanwhile, Laura attempts to hide Roland (whom the script forgets about once more things start to happen), to rescue some hostages from the resort (including a tour guide who escapes a shootout off-screen, despite the fact that we last see her standing directly in the line of fire without trying to get away), and to be the single capable figure in the whole mess. Maybe that's just Fitzgerald, though, whose performance suggests levels of confidence and competence that are otherwise absent in front of and behind the camera.

The dialogue here goes for cool but sounds disinterested coming from the actors. The violence is both uncomfortably cruel and laughably cut-rate, with digital muzzle flashes, blood spurts, and explosions that sometimes don't seem to line up with the physical actors, props, or sets. At one point, a character fires grenades into a hotel, and despite the sounds of loud explosions, it looks as if the filmmakers rigged some lights with red gels throughout the interior of the building—because that's probably exactly what they did.

This movie, which is barely an excuse for one, was directed by Michael Polish, who was once a maker of charmingly off-beat indie films. That's only worth mentioning, perhaps, because Alarum has the quality—or, better, the lack thereof—of a complete filmmaking amateur. It's far from the case, though, and that makes this muddled project an object worthy of some melancholy to go along with the puzzling boredom of its existence.

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