It’s hard to say what’s worse about The Condemned: the monotonous, uninteresting fight sequences staged like pro-wrestling matches and shot with shaky, headache-inducing handheld cameras; or the awkward, heavy-handed dialogue scenes, with huge, undiluted chunks of exposition and nauseatingly hypocritical speeches about the irresponsible depiction of violence in the media. This movie dares to show you former WWE star Austin (having dropped the “Stone Cold” from his name) kicking some serious ass, and then have another character admonish you for enjoying watching it.
Not that you actually would enjoy watching it, though, since all of the violence in the movie is boring and hard to follow—which is unfortunate since it’s the film’s only selling point. The brutally simple concept (ripped off from sources including the Japanese cult film Battle Royale and the Schwarzenegger action classic The Running Man) finds 10 death-row convicts from various Third World prisons stranded on an island and told to kill each other, with the last one standing awarded freedom. It’s all being filmed by a sadistic billionaire (Mammone) for broadcast on the Internet.
A movie like this should be quick and to the point: Austin punches everybody, kills the bad guy, the end. But at nearly two hours, it’s nearly two hours too long, and there are endless meandering cutaways to FBI agents somehow unable to find an island occupied by a billionaire, an entire TV network’s worth of broadcasting equipment and 10 notorious criminals brought in by helicopters from all around the world. There’s also a go-nowhere subplot about Austin’s ex-girlfriend back in Texas, providing just enough back story to prove that he’s been wrongly lumped in with all the murderers and rapists.
As wrestlers-turned-actors go, Austin doesn’t have nearly the charisma of The Rock, and as the ostensible star he cedes a surprising amount of screen time to useless supporting characters. Nearly all of the acting is stiff and unconvincing, and only British star Jones, with his thug charm, exhibits any personality. In a film like this, that just means he delivers the terrible one-liners and gratuitous kicks to the head with a smile that is almost convincing. .