I feel horrible for linking such a hurtful tragedy to a movie - a silly action movie at that - but seeing The Condemned just two days after the Virginia Tech shooting makes it hard to put the thought out of my mind. When the film talks about the fascination people have with watching real violence and showing media culture that turns criminals into celebrities, the image of the news continually regurgitating Seung-Hui Cho's mug is inevitable, and the fact that a lot of people are hungry to know more about the teeny little details of the shooting is nearly as off-putting as the idea of pay-per-view snuff.
A film like The Condemned is not the right venue to properly discuss something like that, obviously, but it does bring up a hot button issue into attention, and that's more than we can say for most movies of its ilk.
With a set-up that borrows heavily from Battle Royale, The Condemned puts ten death row convicts on a deserted island, where they must have a, er, battle royale until one is left alive. What separates this from the Japanese film is the addition of an Internet broadcast subplot, and how the film surprisingly spends more time with that subject than with the convicts fighting. This spins a social commentary that Battle Royale never attempted to make, and makes The Condemned somewhat unique for its emphasis on the control room of the production. The sucker for satire within me can't help but grin when a live broadcast of a brutal rape is shown with gambling pop-up ads flashing at the bottom of the screen.
The man behind the illegal event is an ambitious and slimy millionaire TV producer Ian Breckel (Robert Mammone), who uses his money to buy convicts from all over the world and promises them freedom, hoping to rise a notch into billionaire status by offering webcasts of the event for 50 bucks in membership. His goal: to get more hits than Superbowl ratings. Stone Cold Steve Austin plays Jack Conrad, a prisoner plucked from a Central American prison originally as a test fight against a chosen contestant. When Conrad knocks the guy out with ease, Breckel picks him instead. Conrad has a surprisingly shallow rap sheet, and it turns out that he's not really what he seems to be. He's not looking to kill anybody, but ends up butting heads with the wildcard of the game: a sadistic ex-SAS mercenary named McStarley (Vinnie Jones). You don't have to be smarter than a 5th grader to know who the last two men standing's gonna be.
Here's what's surprising: With this type of movie, especially with this kind of story, you naturally assume a mindless, violent, typically corny fare with a couple of decent fight scenes to munch popcorn through. But what it delivers is the opposite. The Condemned pretty much fails as an action movie. So much of the excitement relies solely on hand-to-hand combat scenes, which are shot with a camera style so unbearably shaky that you can't tell what the hell you're looking at. Pretty hard to get those adrenaline juices pumping from watching blurry figures dancing. And yet, maybe unintentionally so but still valid just the same, this is why the message of The Condemned works. It doesn't come off as hypocritical because it masks its own violence for you. Most of the gory and violent moments happen off-screen, and accompanied by reaction shots of the producers in the control room as they either do the evil cackle or regret their involvement. The aforementioned rape scene is particularly unpleasant to sit through, even though the film doesn't really show any of it. The black humor of the satire reaches a high point at the end, when the violence these people are selling comes back to bite them in the ass.
Still, there's no reason to actively seek this movie out. The social message, no matter how relevant, is really obvious; and the film doesn't expand much on it beyond the premise. It just has the gigantic balls to call its own audience bloodthirsty savages. Since it takes itself way too seriously to be a fun action film, it's not even an appealing movie for the guys to get together and drink beers to. Sure, it's by far the best WWE film to date, but that's not really saying much, is it?
Steve Austin is a very believable action lead, at least, and it won't be a bad thing to hope that his next one can be better.
"The Condemned" opens April 27, 2007 and is rated . . Written by Scott Wiper, Rob Hedden.
