I've rarely seen a Hollywood flick as wrongheaded as this one. There's few things as ridiculous as a filmmaker who, not content with making a big dumb movie, tries to convince you that the retarded mess you've just witnessed actually Means Something. Dude, you can't tack on a message to your movie, you have to earn it. This is like The Island of Dr. Moreau, which follows two hours of grotesque mutated beasts mayhem and Marlon Brando scenery-chewing with a montage of stock footage of war and riots accompanied by a speech about how humans can be "as unstable as anything Moreau created", or "On Deadly Ground", in which Steven Seagal doesn't see any incongruity in going from beating up people and blowing up half of Alaska to pontificating about spirituality and the environment.

Yet, even in those cases, you could kind of imagine that the filmmakers weren't completely full of shit. "The Condemned" is a whole other story. This WWE Films production actually expect us to take it seriously while it goes on and on about how wrong it is to enjoy or profit from violence. Let me repeat: World Wrestling Entertainment is wagging its finger at people who make money showing guys beating each other up and at those who have fun watching it. Does it get any more hypocritical than that?

Now, you might suggest that there's a difference between wrestling, which is fake (yeah, you heard me), and putting ten death row convicts on an island, having them kill each other until only one is left alive and broadcasting it all live on the web to anyone with a bit of bloodlust and a credit card (yes, it's a rip-off of "Battle Royale" by the way of "The Running Man"). But forget about wrestling and consider the movie itself: how is it not guilty of the very thing it's denouncing? Here's an ultra-violent exploitation film telling us that exploiting violence is wrong, ha!



If writer-director Scott Wiper was truly serious about condemning violent entertainment, the bloody confrontations would occur off-screen. Or, at least, they wouldn't be staged in a way that tries to make them exciting and fun. "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Vinnie Jones and the other big-muscled (or in the case of the few female characters, big-breasted) stars of the film rarely come off as monsters or victims, they're just your regular action heroes and villains, kicking ass and cracking jokes. Which would be fine, really, if Wiper and company had gone easy on the self-righteousness.

Then again, even if it were a straight, no-bullshit action flick, "The Condemned" would still be pretty awful. It often has a straight-to-video feel, the fight scenes are poorly choreographed and Wiper apparently thinks dynamic visuals mean a constantly shaky camera and epileptic editing. Ultimately, the action scenes do a better job than the exposition when it comes to turning us off of violence as entertainment, just by being so damn lousy.

4/24/2007