Let it be known that I have never watched a professional wrestling match all the way through. And yet, something tells me that after the competitors are done fighting, they don't start preaching to the audience an anti-violence message.
The Condemned, the latest film from the WWE's film division, spends most of its nearly two hour running time rubbing our faces in deplorable over the top violence, only to take a turn during the last half and start shaking its finger at us. Director and co-writer Scott Wiper was obviously trying to give his movie a heart-felt message, but something tells me that's not what the wrestling fanbase has come for. The past two films to come out of WWE (
See No Evil and
The Marine) certainly weren't classics, but at least they didn't try to apologize for themselves at the end and stuck to their guns, being dumb and violent all the way through.
The Condemned just ends up being offensive and dumb all the way through.
The plot set up is quite simple, and should be familiar to anyone who has seen
The Most Dangerous Game or the Japanese action thriller
Battle Royale. An evil and heartless Hollywood producer named Ian Breckel (Robert Mammone) has come up with what he feels will be the ultimate Reality Show. 10 vicious convicts, all of whom are on Death Row, are rounded up and dropped on a barren jungle island. The goal is for the convicts to battle with each other in a deadly game of survival. They all have bombs strapped to their ankles that will go off in 30 hours. If one of the convicts is the only one left alive before 30 hours is up, he or she will win their freedom and a wad of cash to begin their new life. Ian and his team set the whole thing up illegally, and decide to air it on the Internet, charging people $50 to watch the carnage as it unfolds in real time through the various cameras that are set up throughout the island. As the game starts, the number of subscribers watching on line begins to grow to Super Bowl-caliber numbers. However, some of Ian's crew, including his girlfriend Julie (Tory Mussett), are starting to have nagging moral feelings about what they're doing to these prisoners. Meanwhile, on the island itself, a wrongly-accused former military man named Jack Conrad (wrestler Steve Austin) is trying his best to survive and possibly find a way to contact civilization and the girl he left behind (Madeleine West). His main opponent in battle is a deranged British madman named Ewan McStarley (Vinnie Jones from
X-Men 3), who will go to any lengths to win his freedom.
With a better script,
The Condemned could have been a pretty biting satire on Internet videos, the public's fascination with violence, and the legal system as well. Unfortunately, the screenplay mainly plays it safe and fills itself to the brim with a number of elaborate and overly gory action sequences. We're forced to watch the actors playing the convicts do terrible things to each other over and over, but the movie itself gives us very little reason to care. It intentionally leaves every convict, even lead hero Jack Conrad, completely undeveloped and with very little background info. We're not supposed to be attached to these people, we're just supposed to hoot and holler when their grisly death is splattered upon the screen. And yet, I was feeling something that I don't think the filmmakers intended while I was watching this movie. I kept on asking myself, who would want to watch something like this? I know, the movie is supposed to be making a comment on violence and the voyeuristic nature of people, but I couldn't help but think that exploiting violence in order to make a point is just as bad as exploiting violence just for the sake of exploiting it. The movie is pretty much competently made and is probably the best-looking film the WWE has put out so far, but so what if the script's not there? The movie could have dug deep into many of the issues it brings up, but it doesn't seem interested, and just wants to throw more blood and gore up there on the screen.
At least until the final 20 minutes or so of the movie, where it suddenly wants to yell at its audience for watching it. We get a teary-eyed news anchor talking about what our society has become, complete with shots of everyone who has been watching the action hanging their heads in shame as the anchor's voice rings out on the soundtrack. This manipulative moment offended me almost more than any of the violent sequences the movie had previously subjected me to. What kind of a movie tries to lure in an audience hungry for action and violence, only to look down on them for watching it? People will come for a movie, and all they'll wind up getting is a guilt trip. Of course, after this message is over, we get even more violence with a particularly bloody climax that I think will hit a little too close to home for some people, especially after the mass shootings in Virginia recently. This is a movie that can't decide if it wants to revel in bad taste or apologize for itself. Someone should have told the filmmakers that they can't have it both ways. The film does try to take short breaks from the violence with a couple of subplots, including FBI agents trying to track down the location of the island itself, and Jack Conrad's girlfriend watching the action from a local bar as she silently hopes he makes it out alive. Unfortunately, they ultimately shouldn't have even bothered in the first place, since the movie is obviously not interested in these plots, and give them a mere passing glance before going back to the carnage.
In his first lead role, Steve Austin gets to show off his physical ability, but displays very little emotion. I guess that's to be expected, but when he's trying to do an emotional scene, such as the one where he sneaks into one of the island's control towers to contact his girl back home, he recites his dialogue with no feeling whatsoever and kills whatever mood the filmmakers were trying to create. In action, he's even less interesting, as his dialogue and personality seems to be made up of every 80s action movie character cliche in the book. We find ourselves as emotionally distant to him as we do to all the other convicts fighting on the island, because the movie never gives us a chance to truly know him. In comparison, Vinnie Jones portrays Austin's main rival on the island with joyous evil glee, and probably gives the closest thing resembling a stand-out performance. The rest of the cast is fairly non-existent. The remaining convicts are completely forgettable and don't even get to create anything resembling a genuine character, and Robert Mammone as the soulless man responsible for the carnage never comes across as being as interesting or as hateful as I think the movie intends him to be. Everyone seems to know what kind of movie they're in and go along with it, but no one looks like they're having fun doing it except for the previously mentioned Vinnie Jones.
And that's really the key problem with
The Condemned. The movie is just not fun in any way. It doesn't have the brains to enlighten us with its own preachy message, and at the same time the action is not dumb enough to leave its audience with a goofy grin on their face. It's just a shallow, nasty, manipulative little film that won't appeal to anyone. Wrestling fans won't like the fact that the movie ends up scolding them, and regular movie goers are likely to be bored with the silliness of it all. When all is said and done, I felt offended and angry walking out of this movie, and found myself asking the same question I had asked myself many times throughout it all - Who would want to watch this?
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Let it be known that I have never watched a professional wrestling match all the way through. And yet, something tells me that after the competitors are done fighting, they don't start preaching to the audience an anti-violence message. The Condemned, the latest film from the WWE's film division, spends most of its nearly two hour running time rubbing our faces in deplorable over the top violence, only to take a turn during the last half and start shaking its finger at us. Director and co-writer Scott Wiper was obviously trying to give his movie a heart-felt message, but something tells me that's not what the wrestling fanbase has come for. The past two films to come out of WWE (See No Evil and The Marine) certainly weren't classics, but at least they didn't try to apologize for themselves at the end and stuck to their guns, being dumb and violent all the way through. The Condemned just ends up being offensive and dumb all the way through.
The plot set up is quite simple, and should be familiar to anyone who has seen The Most Dangerous Game or the Japanese action thriller Battle Royale. An evil and heartless Hollywood producer named Ian Breckel (Robert Mammone) has come up with what he feels will be the ultimate Reality Show. 10 vicious convicts, all of whom are on Death Row, are rounded up and dropped on a barren jungle island. The goal is for the convicts to battle with each other in a deadly game of survival. They all have bombs strapped to their ankles that will go off in 30 hours. If one of the convicts is the only one left alive before 30 hours is up, he or she will win their freedom and a wad of cash to begin their new life. Ian and his team set the whole thing up illegally, and decide to air it on the Internet, charging people $50 to watch the carnage as it unfolds in real time through the various cameras that are set up throughout the island. As the game starts, the number of subscribers watching on line begins to grow to Super Bowl-caliber numbers. However, some of Ian's crew, including his girlfriend Julie (Tory Mussett), are starting to have nagging moral feelings about what they're doing to these prisoners. Meanwhile, on the island itself, a wrongly-accused former military man named Jack Conrad (wrestler Steve Austin) is trying his best to survive and possibly find a way to contact civilization and the girl he left behind (Madeleine West). His main opponent in battle is a deranged British madman named Ewan McStarley (Vinnie Jones from X-Men 3), who will go to any lengths to win his freedom.
With a better script, The Condemned could have been a pretty biting satire on Internet videos, the public's fascination with violence, and the legal system as well. Unfortunately, the screenplay mainly plays it safe and fills itself to the brim with a number of elaborate and overly gory action sequences. We're forced to watch the actors playing the convicts do terrible things to each other over and over, but the movie itself gives us very little reason to care. It intentionally leaves every convict, even lead hero Jack Conrad, completely undeveloped and with very little background info. We're not supposed to be attached to these people, we're just supposed to hoot and holler when their grisly death is splattered upon the screen. And yet, I was feeling something that I don't think the filmmakers intended while I was watching this movie. I kept on asking myself, who would want to watch something like this? I know, the movie is supposed to be making a comment on violence and the voyeuristic nature of people, but I couldn't help but think that exploiting violence in order to make a point is just as bad as exploiting violence just for the sake of exploiting it. The movie is pretty much competently made and is probably the best-looking film the WWE has put out so far, but so what if the script's not there? The movie could have dug deep into many of the issues it brings up, but it doesn't seem interested, and just wants to throw more blood and gore up there on the screen.
At least until the final 20 minutes or so of the movie, where it suddenly wants to yell at its audience for watching it. We get a teary-eyed news anchor talking about what our society has become, complete with shots of everyone who has been watching the action hanging their heads in shame as the anchor's voice rings out on the soundtrack. This manipulative moment offended me almost more than any of the violent sequences the movie had previously subjected me to. What kind of a movie tries to lure in an audience hungry for action and violence, only to look down on them for watching it? People will come for a movie, and all they'll wind up getting is a guilt trip. Of course, after this message is over, we get even more violence with a particularly bloody climax that I think will hit a little too close to home for some people, especially after the mass shootings in Virginia recently. This is a movie that can't decide if it wants to revel in bad taste or apologize for itself. Someone should have told the filmmakers that they can't have it both ways. The film does try to take short breaks from the violence with a couple of subplots, including FBI agents trying to track down the location of the island itself, and Jack Conrad's girlfriend watching the action from a local bar as she silently hopes he makes it out alive. Unfortunately, they ultimately shouldn't have even bothered in the first place, since the movie is obviously not interested in these plots, and give them a mere passing glance before going back to the carnage.
In his first lead role, Steve Austin gets to show off his physical ability, but displays very little emotion. I guess that's to be expected, but when he's trying to do an emotional scene, such as the one where he sneaks into one of the island's control towers to contact his girl back home, he recites his dialogue with no feeling whatsoever and kills whatever mood the filmmakers were trying to create. In action, he's even less interesting, as his dialogue and personality seems to be made up of every 80s action movie character cliche in the book. We find ourselves as emotionally distant to him as we do to all the other convicts fighting on the island, because the movie never gives us a chance to truly know him. In comparison, Vinnie Jones portrays Austin's main rival on the island with joyous evil glee, and probably gives the closest thing resembling a stand-out performance. The rest of the cast is fairly non-existent. The remaining convicts are completely forgettable and don't even get to create anything resembling a genuine character, and Robert Mammone as the soulless man responsible for the carnage never comes across as being as interesting or as hateful as I think the movie intends him to be. Everyone seems to know what kind of movie they're in and go along with it, but no one looks like they're having fun doing it except for the previously mentioned Vinnie Jones.
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