Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

The most dim-witted game

In “The Condemned,” an insultingly stupid ripoff of “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Running Man,” pro wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin puts to rest any questions about how he came by his nickname.

With his bullet head, beetle brow, iron jaw and thick slab of a body — watching him run brings to mind a steroid-addled crab — he maintains an expressionless granite countenance right up to the very last frame, when he struggles to raise one corner of his mouth in something akin to a grin and it seems that the strain might crack his face.

Yes, as an actor, Stone Cold is no Dwayne Johnson. And since Dwayne, aka “The Rock,” isn’t exactly Sir Laurence Olivier, this is a problem. Hey, what do you expect from a film that was executive-produced by blowhard World Wrestling Entertainment impresario Vince McMahon?

But the petrified-wood acting is only the tip of the iceberg. So much more is just plain wrong here, starting with the premise — an Internet pay-per-view murder extravaganza called, naturally, “The Condemned,” a savagely devolved version of “Survivor.”

Ian Breckel (Robert Mammone), the Jeff Probst of this endeavor, has bought a small, deserted island, rigged it with hundreds of cameras, airdropped in 10 death-row cons from hellhole jails around the world and given them a simple instruction — be the last one alive after 30 hours and go free. And he plans to stream it all live online for $49.99 per person.

To reach “Super Bowl” numbers — 40 million viewers — he has carefully selected his combatants for diversity. Along with Jack Reilly (Stone Cold), there’s a viciously sociopathic Brit (Vinnie Jones), a crazed Japanese ninja (Masa Yamaguchi) and various other faceless fodder, including two amply endowed women with strategically unbuttoned blouses.

So the wanton slaughter begins. I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to movie violence, but it’s tough to think of another movie in recent memory with violence more gratuitous than this.

Among the lowlights: A woman is assaulted and raped while her husband is chained to a tree and forced to watch; a man with a broken leg is tortured at length and then burned alive; and five cowering, unarmed people — three of them women — are leisurely and sadistically shot in cold blood.

To be sure, we’ve seen worse on movie screens. But “The Condemned” irreparably jumps the shark when a mainstream television reporter (Angie Milliken) does an interview with Breckell in which she tut-tuts about his “pay-per-view snuff film” and moralizes about the kind of low people who would provide an audience for such fare.

Oozing faux concern, she stares into the camera and purrs: “Are we ‘the condemned’?”

Give me a break.

Look, have the stones to either revel in the blood and muck or decry those who revel in the blood and muck — but trying to have it both ways is the height of hypocrisy. (In fact, one might say it’s the kind of manipulative and cynical bullpap that has made Mr. McMahon very rich in his main avocation as WWE czar).

Yet it still might be possible to forgive the movie for all that if it had any trace of wit or flair. But both script and star have neither.

Stone Cold’s character is given a thinly contrived back story that sets him up as a wrongly accused, good-guy American patriot, but he remains a very tough guy to root for. You might as well be rooting for a sack of gravel.

Everything you need to know about “The Condemned” can be gleaned from viewer reactions at my packed preview screening.

The first few on-screen deaths sparked hooting and hollering, as the crowd sought to get into the requisite spirit of such junky fare. But as the film plodded on, a numb quiet crept in — and never dissipated.

At first, I thought this might have been due to uneasiness over the escalating brutality. Then it hit me: We were all just bored out of our skulls.

0 stars. Rated R for violence, language. Opens April 27.