The Condemned: Critic Reviews

Cheesy enough to satisfy your B-movie cravings in half Grindhouse's running time.

The Condemned is tailor-made for those who like their violence multifaceted and their women monosyllabic.

If you thought getting voted off the island on Survivor was tough, The Condemned takes that concept as ridiculously and hideously far as can be imagined.

After indulging the audience in butt-kicking action, director Scott Wiper and his small squad of co-writers segue into disingenuous moralizing about the way society enjoys watching violence.

Nobody rooting for the movie career of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin , the big, swaggering professional wrestler, wants to hear that his debut vehicle, The Condemned, is execrable. So those people will have to stop reading, because it is.

It's not only morally bankrupt but, between the ludicrous script and Z-level acting, scrapes the bottom of the entertainment barrel, too.

Condemn it to obscurity if you can.

The Deadliest Game has played out many times on screen, including with Arnold Schwarzenegger in a post-apocalypse The Running Man, but rarely is it aimed as squarely at the pitfalls of pop culture as in The Condemned.

What happens in The Condemned is wrong on so many levels; it's sick, twisted, bloody and brutal, and yet it's compelling -- until its preposterousness busts at the seams.

Despite a slick production and good actors, The Condemned is a real stinker.

This cynical action picture wants to have its cake and eat it too.

Austin deserves better material than this. So do we.

The film presents its pulp cruelty without irony, and that lack of anesthetic distancing makes its sadism genuinely reprehensible.

The Condemned attempts to redeem itself with some late-inning moralizing that only cheapens the proceedings; if you're going to brandish as many guns as The Condemned does, at least stick to 'em in the end.

Pic could use more humor, though it does have scattered unintentional laughs, particularly one late, solemnly admonishing speech about how those producing entertainment need to take responsibility for glorifying violence.

The Condemned, directed by Scott Wiper (appropriate last name), is a bad rip-off of the 2000 Japanese sensation Battle Royale and the 1932 U.S. classic The Most Dangerous Game.

What the bottom-feeding bottom-liners at WWE condemned us to was a cut-rate action film with a promising premise, lacking the heart or smarts to make us care.

While rather preposterously hypocritical in its moral pretensions, it nevertheless comes through in the no-holds-barred, body-slam department.

Most TV wrestling matches are better scripted than The Condemned.

The Condemned is the latest action film from director Scott Wiper. It is also a noun describing those poor viewers who end up stuck in a theater showing this film.

As off-putting and ridiculous as it is ponderous, this WWE Films enterprise should have been condemned to fight for space on the DVD shelves rather than be thrust upon unsuspecting moviegoers.

It has the audacity to serve as a self-righteous indictment of graphic, gratuitous violence, even though that's exactly what it's peddling.

A zillionaire collects 10 hard cases from death rows around the world (how about that, even Running Man rip-offs are being outsourced).