No doubt folks far and wide will dispise THE CONDEMNED. It stars a side of beef who has barely any dialogue, it is afflicted with The Shaky-Cam Disease, presents violence as sheer entertainment and resorts to any number of button pushing tricks be they moral, ethical, logical, racial or sexual. People don’t like being straight-up offended in such a blunt way so they will lash out.
To which I reply “Shame–SHAME!” Don’t you know there are little kids in India who don’t even HAVE graphic actioners like this one? Plenty of lavish and nonsensical musicals, to be sure, but no B-Grade Velveeta like THE CONDEMNED. Your luxury disgusts me! THINK BEFORE YOU SPEAK, YOU INSENSITIVE PRICK! People made BILLIONS in the nineteen-eighties with movies like THE CONDEMNED and in fact, some of you were dumb enough to elect one of those people as Governor of California.
Anyway, THE CONDEMNED stars Steve “STONE COLD! STONE COLD! STONE COLD!” Austin as Jack Conrad, and Ex-Special Forces dude (ain’t they always?) rotting away in a prison in El Salvador for a crime he didn’t commit. He gets snatched up by Entertainment Impresario (said so you can hear the capital letters) Ian Breckel, played by Robert Mammone. He’s putting on a little Internet Pay-Per-View where ten death-row inmates are put on an island and left to kill each other in thirty hours so the last soap-dropper standing can be set free.
Stuff blows up. People die. This concludes the “plot” section of this review.
What made me groan and raise my eyebrows at the same time in THE CONDEMNED is that more than willing to exploit the race and gender of some of the fighters on the island. The women are in danger because there are rapist-killers on the loose, and there must–MUST!–be a foul-mouthed black dude and a kung-fuey Japanese guy. So I groaned at that, but they were upfront; actually going to the lengths of EXPLAINING through dialogue what they were doing. There is a point where Rio (Emelia Burns) is almost raped by a German murderer before she jams a jagged length of wood into his throat and runs off. Breckel turns to one of his associates in the production room and asks “How high do you think the hits are gonna be when people find out that this right wing nut just got killed by some African chick with a great rack?”
Is this where the exploitation of the characters stops and exploitation of the actual AUDIENCE begins? I was about to answer that question, but stuff blew up and all that pesky “thought” nonsense went away.
Getting into the social ramifications of THE CONDEMNED is like looking at that little “Nutrition Facts” thing on the side of a can of Pepsi. Do you drink Pepsi to be healthy? I sure as shit thought not, so why analyze the plot and motivation of a movie starring an ex pro-wrestler like you’re studying the blueprints to Fort Knox so you can try and break in later?
This is the importance of the star rating at work. I am giving THE CONDEMNED the same damn number of stars I gave CHILDREN OF MEN and if anyone asks which one I thought was better, so help me God I will come through this screen and beat the living shit out of you. If you actually have a choice between the two, you know which one you’re going to watch already so WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR? If an action movie like DIE HARD gets four stars, then THE CONDEMNED gets three and THE MARINE gets one because it blows ass. I went to THE CONDEMNED to see shaky-cam violence and I got what I came for. I went to DEAD SILENCE to be frightened and creeped out. See how it works now?
So yes, it is a BATTLE ROYALE/NO ESCAPE/THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME knock off, but it’s a good one. The fighting looks like actual fighting and not an elaborate interpretive dance in which no one gets hurt. Although with some of the fighters, and how you feel about them, some of the killings leave just a might to be desired.
And to all you wrestling fans, please delight in the irony of the fact that WWE Chairman Vince McMahon executive produced a movie about a guy charging people fifty bucks a pop for a Pay-Per-View featuring one bad finish after another… Moving on…
So I got what I paid for. But the chocalate on the pillow at Hotel CONDEMNED are a couple of damned fine preformances. Playing the head tech guy Goldman is character actor Rick Hoffman who, after last year’s dizzyingly overrated HOSTEL, can now make a career out of being the best part of B-Movies. He actually has–GASP!–more than one dimension. I’m surprised they let him through the door.
And there’s the bad guy Ian McStarley, played by Bullet-Tooth Tony himself, Vinnie Jones. I consider Jones a good actor the same way I consider Busta Rhymes a good actor, inasmuch as if he sticks to a particular part, he’ll set the house on fire. And Jones is at his arsony best here, walking the script’s fine exploitation edge. The evil deeds as done by one such as Jones are not the whims of a story or a director, but rather self-contained and performed just to get YOU to hate him more. And you will be surprised at how much you hate this guy by movie’s end.
Which leaves us with Austin. How does he do? Well, if you shaved the head of LQ Jones of CASINO and THE WILD BUNCH and inflated him with brawn like the Michelin Man, you’d get Old Stone Cold… Or at least you would if the movie let him act. WWE Films has stacked the deck against the wrestlers they put in their movies because they’re hedging their bets against a bad performance by giving them precious little dialogue that can’t be grunted or shouted. But there are couple of glimmers there in a couple of medium sized dialogue stretches so I have hope for Austin in the future. And you have to at least give it to Austin that he knows his way around an action sequence and didn’t sink the movie around him like John Cena did last year.
So there you have it. The dirty, filthy, uncomfortable and violent THE CONDEMNED. Dumb as a post, but sharp as a tack about that little bit of information. It’s intent isn’t pure, but this is a site devoted to horror films most of the time. Around here, the intent so very rarely is.
3 out of 4
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