The Condemned (2007)

Co-writer/director Scott Wiper overestimated how many people would pay to watch a webcast of ten convicts forced to fight each other to the death on a desert island, same as WWE overestimated how many people would pay to watch a movie about such a webcast.

At least the webcast, even with its supposed 30-hour runtime, presumably doesn’t cut away from the action, such as it is, to secondary subplots and tertiary characters not on the island — it's as if Jurassic Park said, "let's go see what's happening some place else where there are no dinosaurs."

“Jack Conrad [Steve Austin] is awaiting the death penalty in a corrupt Central American [Salvadoran, to be exact] prison” (IMDb). So corrupt is this prison that Jack would be the first person executed in El Salvador since the early 70s. I don’t know about cruel, but that would certainly be unusual punishment.

Jack is spared this fate by Ian Breckel (Robert Mammone), a "billionaire" TV producer, and taken to a desolate island where he must fight to the death against nine other convicted murderers of multiple nationalities. Each has an ankle bracelet/time bomb, complete with the trusty old Red Digital Readout counting down the 30 hours mentioned above.

These bombs are the only thing that comes close to 'thinking outside the box', especially since they can be activated by removing a pin; however, the onscreen execution, as it were, leaves a lot to be desired, and even if it were done right, it would still grow old fast, considering that it's the most common method of killing (accounting for 30% of deaths among participants).

Worst of all, Wiper unforgivably squanders the opportunity to have one of the characters amputate his own foot and use it as a makeshift grenade grenade (Nathan Jones is also in this movie, because one bald former pro wrestler apparently wasn’t enough).

Sep 6, 2022