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“The Condemned” won’t be able to
buy a good review anywhere, and no defender of it could mount a case for its
being anything much — besides being ridiculous. Yet there’s a place for this
kind of movie, with its flashy premise, big action and its charismatic wrestler
in the lead role. The picture was created to do three things: to appall, to
thrill and to provide its oversize hero with enough pre-homicide wisecracks to
maintain audience interest: “Sounds like you had a hard life. Good thing it’s
over.”
[Podcast: Movies with Mick LaSalle: OK movies with big problems but Mick likes 'em anyway.]
Point being, before we completely dismiss “The Condemned,” we should note
one thing. There’s “Grindhouse,” containing two features in which directors
Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino satirize, exalt and take inspiration
from B-movies and low budget action films. And then there’s “The Condemned,”
the real thing. “The Condemned” isn’t post-modern junk, smirky junk, faux junk
or clever junk. It’s pure junk, with a certain integrity to it.
Taken for what it is — genuine grindhouse fodder, a movie with roots in
the B-movie tradition — the picture has some distinct gut-level pleasures.
Ten hardened murderers, all awaiting execution in the hellhole prisons of the
world, are taken to a remote island near New Guinea and given one instruction:
Kill each other. In the end, only one survivor will make it off the island with
the grand prize — freedom and an unspecified large sum of money. The
mastermind of this diabolical scheme is a reality TV producer named Breckel,
who is played by Robert Mammone, an Australian actor who, for some reason,
adopts an American accent here. No, this role called for a British accent.
Anyway, Breckel is heartless, duplicitous and greedy. He has rigged the
island with cameras and is selling his reality-death marathon as a live stream
over the Internet for $50 per customer. Obviously, he is the future of
entertainment. Among the prisoners is an American, played by wrestler Steve
Austin, who will never win an Oscar but has one distinct advantage as a screen
entity — he looks like the biggest, toughest man alive. He’s a bald mountain
of muscle. He looks like, if you punched him, you’d break your hand. Austin
plays a retired Special Forces soldier who somehow ended up in a Latin American
prison, but he doesn’t tell anybody about his military past. Instead, when
asked about himself, he says, “I’m an interior decorator.” Only people who
think that’s a funny line should consider seeing “The Condemned.”
For the record, I think that’s funny, but even funnier is writer-director
Scott Wiper’s attempt to position his film as a critique of violence in
entertainment. The villainous producer is shown making all the usual cases for
violence onscreen: People enjoy it. It’s not aimed at kids. It serves as a
release and not an incitement. But the producer is proven to be a selfish
monster. His island experiment results in rape, torture and murder. At one
point, a murderer/contestant comes upon a geek who has been watching the
slaughter onscreen. “You enjoy watching all this?” he asks incredulously.
Yet at the same time “The Condemned” trades on precisely the screen
violence it criticizes. You have to love an anti-violence movie that has as its
slogan, “10 people will fight. 9 people will die. You get to watch.” Hypocrisy
in and of itself isn’t amusing, but when it’s on this grand a scale it becomes
hilarious.
– Advisory: Strong language and nonstop violence.
To hear Mick LaSalle talk about movies, listen to his weekly podcast at
sfgate.com/podcasts.
