Friday, April 27, 2007
The movie does have a message, but it doesn't come across very well.
By COLIN COVERT
(MINNEAPOLIS) STAR TRIBUNE
Unhappily timed to hit theaters days after the largest mass murder in U.S. history, "The Condemned" is yet another film offering a graphic killing spree as entertainment.
The plot involves an evil television producer who buys 10 condemned murderers from their Third World jailers and forces them to fight to the death until only one remains, selling the bloodbath on Internet pay-per-view.
WWE wrestler Steve Austin plays one of the combatants, an American whose stay on death row hasn't soured his grim sense of humor. When the producer asks about his past, the hulking Goliath rumbles, "I'm an interior decorator."
Hard to watch
Despite higher production values than most of its torture-porn cousins, "The Condemned" is difficult viewing. The film presents its pulp cruelty without irony, and that lack of anesthetic distancing makes its sadism genuinely reprehensible.
It's possible to read the film's vision of heartless cutthroat Darwinism as a metaphor for winner-take-all economic tensions in the United States, or a commentary on capital punishment, or a parable of the war on terror ("I've got to have an Arab" shouts the demographics-obsessed broadcaster), but that's probably giving the film's creators too much credit.
Message
The script does have a message, and it's put across with ham-handed clumsiness. Between bouts of gory action, a handful of characters condemn the spectacle. These sermons play less like sincere efforts to question our appetite for brutality than a glib attempt to provide moral cover for more of the same.
As the savagery escalates to stomach-churning levels, a TV technician played by "Hostel's" Rick Hoffman suffers a crisis of conscience. "I'm having trouble keeping food down," he says. Audiences of "The Condemned" are likely to share the feeling.