Awful movie, but you gotta love the innocent Stallone...

Rating: 5/10 (29 August 2010)

Inside this large aging slick celebrity beats the heart of a 12 year-old wrestling fan, and it's let out to play when he directs a movie. In a Hollywood overrun with action directors seeking to one-up each other in realism, here's a guy who you can see is still very much in touch with his childhood action imagination.
As you watch this movie (along with the latest Rambo, another action throwback that he also directed), you can almost hear his directives:
"Hey, in this scene, wouldn't it be awesome if this guy got torn in half? Actually, let's have him get punched in the balls first though."
"I want the good guy to upper-cut the bad guy so hard that he flies up in the air, and then he'll throw him back down to the ground with the same hand! Can we do that? Let's do that. It'll be so cool."
"I've got this great idea, one of our good guys will have his own special gun, and it'll be like this super gun that only he has, it'll be really powerful and stuff, you know? And he only takes it out when things get really bad so he winds up saving the day, right? Let's do that."
The problem for me is that these "qualities" extend to Stallone's story writing, too -- this innocent little boy has no qualms about repeating overused clichés and melodrama, and god bless him for being that innocent; but those are unfortunately my biggest downers when it comes to movies.
Now, I realize this particular movie is billed as an intentional throwback of sorts, but having seen it, to chalk it up to simply being "old-school" would be giving it too much credit. This movie is frankly bad, even for an '80s cliché. Stallone might defend it by implying that he could make a good modern movie and simply chooses not to, and we all might go along with that explanation because we love the guy so much; I'm just not sure how truly accurate it is.
Stallone's creative tendencies wouldn't be so much of a problem, except for the fact that he insists on taking such an active role in writing the scripts he directs. Were he to inject some of his originally-unrealistic explosive action into a well-crafted script, we really might have something special.