Leave it to Sylvester Stallone to turn the restoration of a 1965 Mustang into a workout montage. By the time he made “Lock Up” in 1989, he’d already done four Rockys and three Rambos, and yet his idea of branching out was to play a short-timer convict who gets beat up a lot. Donald Sutherland plays a sadistic warden (is there any other kind in Hollywood?) trying to keep Sly inside. John Amos, Frank McRae and Tom Sizemore provide strong support, but the story is an unimaginative mashup of Stallone’s previous work with some of “The Longest Yard” thrown in.
Archives for posts with tag: Sylvester Stallone
Believe it or not, if you’re watching “Escape Plan: The Extractors” (2019), it helps to have seen the first two installments in this trilogy, if only to familiarize oneself with the implausibility of the action scenes. (I mean, why, in a six-on-one fight, do the six bad guys take turns fighting the one good guy? Why do they never all jump him at once?) Anyway, this is fresh off the assembly line of low-budget, action flicks Sylvester Stallone has been operating in recent years between boxing movies. People get kidnapped. He leads a team to save them. Figure it out.
You know how some of those true crime TV shows do cheesy reenactments? The ones where they film these low-budget scenes with obscure actors who sort of look like the people involved? The ones that make you wish you were watching an actual documentary instead of a docudrama? OK, so take the story of Chuck Wepner, the journeyman boxer who went toe-to-toe with Muhammed Ali and “inspired” Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa character, and turn it into one of those cheesy docudramas. Oh, wait – “The Brawler” (2019) already did. It’s not terrible, it’s just cheesy, but with a cameo by Paulie.
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