An offensively ineffectual actioner that marked a new low for a slumming icon executes a daring breakout on Netflix

The career of Sylvester Stallone has been defined by ups and downs for half a century, and there’s no year that encapsulates that sentiment better than 2018.

As well as delivering another widely-acclaimed performance in the critical and commercial smash hit Creed II, the veteran also headlined his two worst-reviewed features ever, which released only six months apart. His disdain for Escape Plan 2: Hades is well-known – but didn’t stop him starring in a third one – yet he’s never really acknowledged the existence of Backtrace at all, which is fair enough.

An eight percent Rotten Tomatoes approval rating and 23 percent audience average puts it just above Escape Plan 2 as the second lowest-rated entry in his entire filmography on the aggregation site, but because it’s a run of the mill action thriller with a big star plastered front-and-center, the monotonous bore has inevitably been surging on Netflix this week.

Per FlixPatrol, Backtrace is one of the Top 20 most-watched titles on the streaming service’s worldwide watch-list, and it’s ironic that plenty of subscribers will no doubt be left wishing they could forget the interminable offering given that the story revolves around an amnesiac inmate extricated from prison who then gets injected with an experimental serum designed to return their memories and help recover a pile of stolen cash.

There isn’t anyone in Hollywood to have balance classics and catastrophes in equal measure quite like Stallone, although there are no prizes for guessing which end of the spectrum this one falls on.