Get Carter (2000), Rocky Balboa (2006), John Rambo (2008), and now Death Wish (2009). To some, just four more Sylvester Stallone movies they'd rather staple their eyelids to the floor than watch. To others, proof that insane amounts of human growth hormone can totally allow a 61-year-old to go the distance with the heavyweight champion of the world - but it can't get him an original motion picture.
And so to the latest milestone in what we might refer to as Sly's asterisked period: this week's announcement that he is to star in a remake of Death Wish. Was the 1974 Charles Bronson classic in more desperate need of being remade than the Michael Caine classic? That is a question for a more high-minded world cinema fan than Lost in Showbiz.
What is clear on this occasion, however, is that in latching on to a franchise that ran to five iterations, Sly is beginning to accept his fate, and we wish him all the best churning out Death Wishes, until he finally bulks up sufficiently to play Marion Jones in The Balco Story II, slated to be the blockbuster hit of summer 2017.
