50 bucks for this? A rigged Survivor to the death? A 30-hour marathon broadcast on the Internet? And it’s not even exciting or original?
Back when they were actively pushing their biggest wrestlers to become movie stars, the WWE developed its own studio and realized fairly quickly that they had no idea how to make a good movie or even one with mass appeal.
They tried elevating Kane as an actual monster in the dreadfully derivative See No Evil. Before he landed Haven, Edge was drowning in the laughless cop comedy Bending The Rules. Big Show was reduced to wearing a silly wig with few comic rewards in Knucklehead. All of them massive bombs.
For every John Cena and Rock who managed to break through and forge their own paths, there was Ted DiBiase Jr. and The Miz, relegated to the video store, the same place you’d find Batista until he became a Guardian Of The Galaxy.
And that’s where Stone Cold Steve Austin ultimately found himself after trying his luck with The Condemned, a widely dismissed, routine theatrical action thriller. Released in 2007, after four weeks in release, it didn’t even crack ten million.
The premise is simple. An arrogant producer wants to do a reality show too hot for network TV. He wants to recruit ten death row prisoners for a contest. (Wardens are easily bribed.) They’ll be relocated to a tropical island where they have 30 hours to survive the elements and each other.
Each is secured with a tracking device that doubles as a bomb. You try to tinker with it, it blows up. If a red mechanism is pulled out, it explodes in ten seconds. The last prisoner alive gets their freedom.
The problem is, murder and mayhem aside, the whole thing is a work. The unscrupulous producer, who resembles an evil John Stamos, has already selected who he wants to win: disgraced war criminal Vinnie Jones, a cartoonish Brit with a long rap sheet of despicable acts of violence.
A website is launched and you have to pay to be bored by this bullshit. Early on, we see how a couple of the contestants are picked. There’s a big man from Belarus who has to subdue three fellow prisoners in front of a two-man film crew before he’s chosen.
And then there’s Austin, a semi-retired drug warrior stuck in El Salvador after getting caught blowing up some dealers. The racist producer wants an Arab to satisfy that large audience but his guy gets killed before the show starts so a substitute is found in Austin’s prison.
Thrown in a situation he easily survives, Austin becomes the replacement. When he’s later interviewed by the producer himself, he gives smart ass answers to his probing questions. So the producer smears him by creating an awful fake bio that reinvents him as a heartless, murderous Klansman.
Rounding out the unwilling participants are a shady African dame, a Black pot dealer who escaped death row in America only to find himself sentenced to extinction in Malaysia (he obviously didn’t do his homework), a murderous married couple, a Japanese kung fu artist, some creep with the unfortunate name Bruggerman and some other foreign-speaking Latino character who never gets to participate because of a serious botch during the drop-offs.
Infamous for his cutting promos, it’s a bit surprising to see Austin going the Eastwood route here. He mostly glares and smirks and his dialogue, sometimes peppered with throwaway one-liners, is kept to a bare minimum. A huge mistake considering how the wrestling audience hung on his every word once he figured out his persona.
But at least people know who he is. In a cast rounded out by unknowns, like Jones, he stands out because everybody else is fighting for minutes of screen time with next to no character development aside from a quick drive-by criminal history before they get stabbed or blown up real good. Despite an overlong running time, we barely get to know who these people are.
The cast is deliberately diverse but that doesn’t excuse the casual racism which seems especially cheap in this context. And because this is a Vince McMahon production, back when he still thought he was a movie mogul, the women fall into the usual stereotypes: desexualized nerd; sexed-up savages with cleavage; weeping, helpless girlfriends; victims of violence.
The most annoying thing about The Condemned, however, is the shoddy camera work. I’m grateful I saw this on DVD and not in a theatre because the constant shakiness during the action scenes would’ve been even more disorienting. It’s very difficult to follow the various hits and misses, not that the fight choreography is anything but rudimentary. This is some weak-ass bullshit.
The movie very slowly builds to the inevitable final confrontations between Austin, Jones, who at least has a personality, and of course the cowardly producer who flees at the mere mention of being spotted by the authorities and makes the mistake of reneging on his arrangement with his handpicked winner.
Because it is painfully obvious that Austin will be the sole survivor (the tag line gives it all away in an instant), the movie goes through the tired motions of pretending he won’t. During his second-to-last battle with Jones, who has been continually supplied with weapons dropped on the island, he gets shot and falls into the river, presumed to be the last elimination.
While watching it all unfold in the bar she works at, Austin’s divorced gal pal fears the worst. She hasn’t heard from him in a year since he secretly set off for El Salvador. She should know better.
Critics really despised The Condemned upon its short arrival in theatres. Some really went out of their way to trash it actually, calling it vile and irredeemable, with particular scorn reserved for the violence.
Yes, it is a bad film in many ways and yet it could’ve been so much worse. Honestly, it’s not nearly as brutal as I expected, a couple of uncomfortable scenes involving the women notwithstanding. There are a few moments of restraint which are simply heard or seen from a distance on a monitor.
The idea of showcasing extreme violence as entertainment for a large, ravenous audience was better executed, if you’ll forgive the pun, in The Running Man, the Stephen King story that became one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best films. God knows Richard Dawson was a better villain.
The amoral producer in The Condemned lacks the oily charm that would convince otherwise decent people to go along with his high-risk charade, one being carefully monitored by an FBI agent. There’s the obligatory scene where his British girlfriend and his technical director (who hilariously thinks the producer is his “best friend”) appear to have a meeting of the minds. They’ve seen enough and want to pull out.
As the producer pointedly asserts, they knew what they signed up for. Why are they planning to bail now? As it turns out, they’re not so courageous after all. Corruption is a two-way street.
Before the epic round-the-clock broadcast, the producer sits down with some self-righteous journalist who after Austin’s disappearance airs the footage on her show and offers a rather simplistic editorial, knocking the man for knowing his audience. “Are we the condemned?” she rhetorically ponders for embracing all of this, letting the shamelessly feverish exploitations of cable news off the hook. For all its flaws, Cronenberg’s A History Of Violence dealt with the idea of complicity in a more thoughtful manner.
The Condemned wants to have it both ways, too, but all this comes at the expense of its own credibility. In his interview, the producer points out that no one is stopping parents from protecting their kids from his dud of a spectacle. The journo calls that a cop-out. But he isn’t wrong. If the kids get their hands on their parents’ credit cards, that’s not on him. (That aside, VISA and Mastercard are ok with this?)
He’s also not wrong to point out that every cable network like CNN and MTV manipulate their content to maximize their audiences. (CNN in particular is notorious for simplifying complicated foreign policy stories.) How is he any different from them, he argues, perhaps a little too desperately to save his own hide but again he’s not completely off-base. Then again, people don’t get killed in a Weird Al video.
Hoping to attract 40 million households (I thought Super Bowl numbers were 100 million and more), the producer easily achieves his goal but only after several hours of broadcasting. But when you watch what the fictional audience is glued to, you’re not buying it. I mean the technical director doesn’t even have enough cameras to cover the action. And what is covered is far from riveting. There is zero doubt how it will all turn out anyway.
It takes nearly two hours to get to the end and there’s little satisfaction. I’m amazed there aren’t scenes of mass global protests. Not from peace activists and abolitionists opposing what’s depicted on-screen mind you, but from completely ripped off customers wanting their money back.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, February 28, 2022
3:57 a.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 