2. The Condemned
Remember Battle Royale? Wasn't that whole thing cool and meaningful, showing how society can fall into a horrible demise incredibly quickly if we're presented with a violent, neck-blowing-up external force? Remember the salient points it raised about the brutality of society, simply by having the victims be schoolchildren? Ok, now take all those lessons, throw them out the window and replace them with Vinnie Jones, Steve Austin and other similar roid-heads. If you do this, you'll have The Condemned, a film which abandons any sort of prescient point-making for the sake of seeing terrible people go boom. You know what? I don't mind this. Jason Statham's made a career out of these simplistic constructs, and by taking the Battle Royale formula of letting us witness brutal battles and diluting the over-arching message for the excuse of letting us watch ultraviolence with few strings attached, we're left with a perfectly serviceable film. Sure, we still had the idea of people watching this battle for survival, but it's nothing we haven't seen before in similar no-brainers like Death Race, and that was nothing if not mindlessly entertaining. Yet despite enjoying Austin and Jones wade through a pile of corpses to make merry hell on each other, we're still confronted with something beyond the mere comprehension of a WWE film. Simply put, the film attempts a f**k you, arguing in its coda whether you're in fact the condemned for watching a violent piece of trash by giving the faintest cap-doff to self-awareness which utterly jarred in the gleeful carnage it had reveled in up 'til now. Frankly, I refuse to be judged for watching a WWE production where a wooden Stone Cold murdered the blue hell out of everything, and in the most meat-headed way possible, This is the worst sort of clever ending, the last resort of an obviously dumb film to reach above itself and become something more cerebral. It's a colossal failure, and a poor attempt to have its ultraviolent cake and eat it, hiding behind the fig-leaf of poignancy. It proved that occasionally, perhaps going dumb is the way forward, rather than this slapdash, heavy-handed, contrary moralizing.