The Condemned (2007)

Directed by Scott Wiper. Starring Robert Mammone, Steve Austin, Rick Hoffman, Vinnie Jones, Tory Mussett, Madeleine West, Sam Healy, Luke Pegler, Emilia Burns, Marcus Johnson, Manu Bennett, Masa Yamaguchi. [R]

It’s Battle Royale meets The Running Man as a heartless producer played by Mammone scoops up an international pool of death row inmates and ships them off to an island where he will broadcast their battle to the death until only one of them is left standing. What might have been a lean, mean grindhouse-flavored B-movie is actually an overlong, self-important, preachy, and astoundingly hypocritical action movie with a “message”—that message being that it’s wrong to be entertained and titillated by brutality against human beings no matter the sins of their past. Meanwhile, co-writer/director Wiper lets the camera soak in the bestial carnage for the cheap thrills of the viewer, never leaving doubt about what sort of horrors are being committed (especially by Jones, who is so cartoonishly sadistic he might have been funny if his deeds weren’t so ugly). Even ignoring its tasteless pretensions, this is also astonishingly poor action filmmaking; every time a fight breaks out, the shaky cam gets epileptic seizures and the editor slices and dices it all into incoherent fragments. Produced by WWE Films, apparently as a vehicle for its wrestling star, Austin, who at least doesn’t embarrass himself.

9/100