Stallone hunts down an amnesiac robber in this trailer for Backtrace

Most of us plan to retire early. In fact, I wish I could be retired already, but apparently you need money in this world to survive and so I am stuck having to wake up every day and do work things. Then you get someone like Sylvester Stallone who is well into his 70’s and surely has enough of a bank balance to spend the rest of his life sitting on a beach doing nothing – and he seems to be working harder than ever. Something is clearly wrong with this man.

Not only does Stallone pop up sequels to Creed and Escape Plan, he’s also got another Expendables and Rambo movie in development while having somehow also found the time to star in an action movie on the side as well, titled Backtrace. The film sees Stallone play yet another good guy as he teams up with Christopher MacDonald as they hunt down a criminal with amnesia. Given Stallone’s age you would think he might be the one with physical amnesia, but yet he remains as fit as ever and continues to be the action hero in this movie.

Written by Mike Maples and directed by Brian A. Miller, Backtrace features Stranger Thing’s Matthew Modine playing the role of MacDonald, a former criminal mastermind who is left with amnesia following a bank robbery that goes wrong. Years later, however, he is broken out by fellow inmate Lucas (Ryan Guzman) and a penitentiary doctor (Meadow Williams), who attempt to force his memory to return in the hope of finding the millions that MacDonald hid away before he was captured. Obviously it’s up to Stallone, who plays detective Sykes, and FBI agent Franks (McDonald) to try and find the criminals in a case that has a lot more to the eye than just a simple bank robbery:

Miller has a penchant for working with Hollywood’s big action stars of yesterday, as he did with Bruce Willis on Vice and The Prince, but he also has a reputation for making movies that aren’t exactly original or intelligent, which appears to be the case with this one. Not only is this a terrible trailer that reveals far too much about the storyline and potential twists in it, but it plays into almost every cliché you can imagine for a cop movie and even its silly text effects are a clear rip-off. The action will probably be decent enough and the amnesia related plot, while a little silly might keep things intriguing for a short while, but this is unlikely to be a movie that is going to stay interesting for very long.

Which is why it’s a good thing that Backtrace is not getting released to cinema, but will instead be made available through On Demand and streaming services in December, meaning you can watch this in the comfort of your home without needing to fork out large sums of money and then fast forward through all the terrible bits. Hopefully, we won’t need to skip through the entire movie.

 

Last Updated: November 14, 2018