The Condemned
Nobody rooting for the movie career of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin , the big, swaggering professional wrestler, wants to hear that his debut vehicle, "The Condemned ," is execrable. So those people will have to stop reading, because it is.
And in the worst ways, too. For one thing, Austin is barely in it. For another, it tells us that the senseless carnage we're watching is itself indecent. It tells us this while showing a man rake another's eyes until they bleed and giving us two scenes of near sexual assault on a woman.
In the movie, which is a production of Austin's employer, the WWE , a reality- TV producer wrangles together 10 people on death row from all over the world (terrorists, rapists, murderous bank robbers) to star on a show he's airing on the Internet from an undisclosed island. Viewers are expected to pay $49.95 to watch for 30 straight hours as these 10 kill each other. (Nine, actually; the Italian is impaled on a spike of rock before the game even starts.)
At the 30th hour, the last inmate standing goes free. The unlucky have been bludgeoned, shot, or detonated courtesy of a bracelet strapped to each contestant's ankle, which can be manually set off by other contestants. The producer's cynical thinking goes: If you like "Survivor " or "Lost ," you'll probably love this. (His monomaniacal self-justifications bear an unfortunate resemblance to those of the disturbed Virginia Tech killer.)
The movie, of course, lacks the intelligence to make that kind of cynicism mean anything. This is not a satire of reality television or a prediction that we'll watch all of our TV on computers (even if that's true). It's a sadistic grindhouse flick that feels the need to justify its sadism by moralizing against it. Please. If as a moviemaker you're compelled to give us a woman blowing up a man who's just confessed that women always betray him, go ahead. We can take it. But having things both ways is dubious, especially when your most reasonable moralizer is also your biggest psycho contestant. Former soccer brute Vinnie Jones plays the part.
"The Condemned" lasts almost two hours, and you can feel every minute, as the FBI tries to figure out where the show is taking place and as too-few crewmembers start to turn mutinous on the admittedly loathsome producer, played by Robert Mammone .
Through it all, Austin's character, the putative hero, a loner named Conrad who's been scapegoated onto death row (by our government!), demonstrates relative indestructibility. Austin himself is more interesting on a big screen than John Cena and Kane , Austin's fellow WWE stars who've had movies come out in the last year. He has a tough but pliable Texas drawl that makes even the dumbest lines sound witty. You'd almost like to hear him follow a Hugh Laurie acceptance speech with his own. Not likely, but still.
Incidentally, for $49.95 a viewer could also skip the Internet show and just watch Austin on "WrestleMania " instead, avoiding the shower this movie leaves you wanting.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
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