Review of The Condemned

After feeling as though I was tortured while sitting through the first two WWE Films, this time I left the theater feeling as though my money was well spent. Speaking of torture, several graphic torture scenes in this movie have forced it to have an R Rating. If you are a parent of a young child, I do not recommend they see this movie. Older fans that like old-school action movies will enjoy this film.

Steve Austin is a prisoner on death row that is bought by a television producer. Steve and nine other contestants are brought to an island where they must battle to the death. The last survivor will be granted their freedom.

While Vinnie Jones plays the part of the most vile criminal Steve encounters as a combatant, the real villain of the movie is a TV producer that is broadcasting the movie over the Internet. Just to show how corrupt all reality TV shows are, even this reality show is manipulated by the producer to get the results he wants.

With the first movie that Vince McMahon was involved in, No Holds Barred, it was easy to see that the evil TV producer was meant to be Ted Turner. That producer was an evil head of a TV network that wanted to take Hulk Hogan away from the WWE and put him on his own network. I may be reading too much into this, but I think that this villain is partially based on Mr. McMahon. There are several scenes where the producer defends his product by saying that it is the responsibility of parents to monitor what their children watch and if people are so offended by their product then people wouldn't watch. That sounds like the WWE PR mantra when confronted by critics of their programming.