Professional wrestling is such a curious phenomenon—it's loaded to the gills with testosterone, silicone and displays of loudly macho, presumably alpha-male behavior—yet it's really nothing more than masculine soap opera. Both share the same production hallmarks of hastily scripted, histrionic melodrama with lots of feuds and filler, exploiting the elements most attractive to their respective demographics.
If you keep this in mind when watching ""The Condemned,"" WWE Productions' third feature after ""See No Evil"" and ""The Marine,"" it seems a hell of lot funnier than it might have otherwise. You see, this is not just another apathetic, ham-fisted fiesta of violence and bloodshed; rather, it's a socially conscious, moralizing ham-fisted fiesta of violence and bloodshed that aims to make you guilty about paying to see it.
Here we have a hard R-rated film put out by WWE—an organization that markets violence to impressionable kids and trailer trash who can afford cable—that actually tries to sermonize about how awful watching violence is. When an editorializing news reporter intones, ""Those of us who log on, those of us who watch, are we ... the condemned?"" near the end, it would be offensive and insulting if it wasn't so splendidly, hysterically hypocritical.
No matter how you slice it, ""The Condemned"" is a problematic movie, but until it climbs up on its spectacularly misguided high horse, it's actually more fun than you'd expect it to be. The concept is a hardly original mishmash of ""Survivor,"" ""The Running Man,"" ""Ten Little Indians"" and ""The Most Dangerous Game,"" centering on a cruel Internet reality show that pits 10 death-row inmates against each other on a remote island. The last man (or woman) standing gets to go home free, while everyone else gets to meet their maker a little sooner. To ensure that no one escapes, each inmate is equipped with a bomb strapped to his/her ankle, which will set off if he/she explores a little too far.
Masterminded by the greedy, sleazy Ian Breckel (Robert Mammone), cameras are set up all over to capture everything on live streaming video, and web surfers can log on to the show's website and pay 50 clams to watch the action. Intending to garner more viewers than the Super Bowl, Breckel may be one ambitious villain, but he doesn't count on one thing: Stone Cold Steve Austin!
Yes, Stone Cold is the headliner of this thing, and even though he ""probably killed more people than anyone else on that island,"" it's okay because he was a black ops government assassin who got disowned. Jack Conrad is our likable meathead, taciturn unless he's got a one-liner, peaceful unless he's provoked. On the other side of the spectrum is British ex-special agent Ewan McStarley (Vinnie Jones, absolutely the best aspect of this movie), a sadistic, rape-loving fella who's also got a deal going with Breckel. With all these elements at play, in addition to a surprisingly thorough demonstration of how one would actually implement a plan like this, ""The Condemned"" starts off as a harebrained but kind of entertaining satire of reality TV.
But then it has to get all preachy, and that's when it starts to get aggressively lame. It's perfectly disposable entertainment, gleaning all it can from its ludicrous premise and permanently pissed-off leading man, but then co-writer/director Scott Wiper has to get on his soapbox and ruin a perfectly good movie. It's hard to despise a movie this foolish, replete with cheesy tough-guy exchanges that are often intentionally and unintentionally funny at the same time.
With a different director more attuned to the rhythms and qualities of truly great B-movies, this could have been a successful camp classic. But no, Wiper wants us to learn a lesson here, and he thinks that it's a good idea to preach about the questionable morality of watching violence after he's just served up enough savage, mostly unimaginative killings for three movies.
So now is the WWE going to curtail its violence since, after all, the legions of males in arrested development watching its programming are ""condemned?"" Doubtful. But in case you don't see the movie, here's the Cliff Notes assessment of its themes and motifs: a lot of stuff blows up, a ton of people die and, if you enjoyed any kind of filmed violence other than that depicted by Wiper's constantly shaky cam in ""The Condemned,"" you're a sick, sick bastard. Or, perhaps this reviewer is simply a candy ass who doesn't grasp the complex message that Wiper is so passionately pushing. In that case, is it this reviewer who is ... condemned?
