Survivor on steroids

>> The Condemned is so ludicrous it almost works

by MATTHEW HAYS

A brief synopsis of The Condemned is laugh-out-loud funny on its own. A multi-millionaire media mogul decides to make a reality TV show in which 10 convicted murderers square off against each other on a deserted island; the last person alive gets their freedom. No one will care about these people, or so it’s thought, because they are all on death row, so they’re going to die anyway. Meanwhile, said media mogul will get even richer, as people have to pay a fee to watch the events unravel live on the Internet. He manages to get these convicts by buying them from the third-world prisons they’re stuck in.

It’s as silly as it sounds, but watching the marketing machine manoeuvre throughout this feature is actually pretty funny: The Condemned is meant as a vehicle for various wrestling figures, in particular Steve Austin, who plays the good convict. Brit nasty Vinnie Jones is also on hand, doing his bit by acting, well, nasty. As the film unfolds, one can imagine the video game tie-ins—which, come to think of it, are probably more fun than the movie itself.

As strictly boneheaded cinema, The Condemned will probably please its target audience. Director Scott Wiper seems to have stolen a page from the Jerry Bruckheimer school of action sequences, and that’s actually one of The Condemned’s major drawbacks. When crazed psychotic killers from third-world countries start to rumble, the camera gets ultra-jerky and we can’t see anything. It appears as though cinematographer Ross Emery was seriously drunk for much of the shoot.

But The Condemned approaches the hilarious when it tries to get deep. As it turns out, some of the reality-TV team behind the show get queasy while watching convicts get raped and/or murdered for entertainment’s sake, and start to realize that, like, this might be a bad thing. Ultimately, this very self-consciously sleazy movie tells us that wallowing in sleaze for sleaze’s sake might be kinda sleazy. It’s a pretty outrageous bit of hypocrisy, given the film’s roots and aspirations. The Condemned attempts to condemn gratuitous, exploitative violence while offering it up by the shitload. What a concept!

The Condemned opens This Friday, April 27

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