Featuring Sylvester Stallone in what sounds like a rare villain role, action thriller Alarum has just finished shooting. Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald also star.
The Shakespearian-sounding Alarum, an action thriller starring Sylvester Stallone, has just finished filming – and like Brad Anderson’s World-Breaker, is another mid-budget genre film looking for distribution at Cannes this week.
Directed by Michael Polish (Terror On The Prairie), Alarum appears to have cast Stallone in a rare villain role. To the best of our recollection (okay, googling), the only other time Sly’s played an antagonist was in Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over in 2003.
Alarum’s leads are Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald, who play a pair of professional assassins who are off on a romantic break when they find themselves pursued by murderous CIA agents – the scariest of them played by Stallone.
Here’s a full synopsis, courtesy of Deadline. We hope you have a cup of tea ready, because it’s quite long:
Hiding off the grid on a romantic getaway after abandoning their careers as operative killers, assassins-in-love Joe (Scott Eastwood) and Lara Travers witness a deadly plane crash and retrieve a top-secret flash drive from the downed aircraft. But they soon discover that the contents of the drive will bring every intelligence agency in the world after them including the cold-blooded CIA agent Chester (Sylvester Stallone), who is sent to assassinate them. The couple quickly forsake their idyllic lifestyle and employ their formidable skills from their shadowy past to survive the impending onslaught.
Ah, flash drives and USB sticks – the mainstay of any modern thriller.
According to this report over on The Miami Student, filming took place in and around Oxford, Ohio in February of this year, with students at Miami University surprised to find local parks and even a tavern cordoned off by yellow tape. An office space was turned into a fishing supplies shop for the production, while Stallone and his stunt double were pictured padding about the small town in big winter coats.
The same report suggests that the budget for Alarum is around $20m, with the production receiving about $5.9m in tax credits from the state of Ohio.
It’s currently unclear why a contemporary thriller has such an archaic name. ‘Alarum’, an old-school version of the word ‘alarm’, literally means ‘to arms’, and refers to a “warning of danger, especially of being attacked.” The word appeared 89 times in Shakespeare’s first folio according to Lancaster University.
Maybe there’ll be a loud toot from a trumpet each time Stallone appears on screen? We’d pay to see (and hear) that. More on Alarum and Stallone’s potential villainy as we get it.
