All Critics (100)
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Top Critics (28)
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Fresh (17)
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Rotten (85)
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DVD (7)
Cheesy enough to satisfy your B-movie cravings in half Grindhouse's running time.
This is a fast-paced, well-made piece of garbage.
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.
While rather preposterously hypocritical in its moral pretensions, it nevertheless comes through in the no-holds-barred, body-slam department.
You have to love an anti-violence movie that has as its slogan, "10 people will fight. 9 people will die. You get to watch." Hypocrisy in and of itself isn't amusing, but when it's on this grand a scale it becomes hilarious.
When it isn't depicting brutal deaths, the film condemns audiences for flocking to see lurid entertainment. If director Scott Wiper is trying to make a statement, it gets lost in a mirror maze of hypocrisy and self-loathing.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying a balls to the wall guy film where muscle bound behemoths blow shit up and fight to the death...
Convicts fight to the death in reality-TV debacle.
The film even attempts to make moral judgments about how watching a fight to the death is wrong, which ends up alienating anybody that sat their butt down in the theater in the first place.
...Scott Wiper's hopelessly inept directorial choices - coupled with an overall vibe of ugliness - ensures that the movie ultimately fares about as well as its straight-to-video action brethren...
While it seems fairly easy to dismiss the movie as just another cons-gone-wild noisy bone cruncher and a vanity showcase for Austin's over the top muscle flexing, it does manage to get in some sucker punch satirical jabs.
Despite the transparent plotline, the dumb dialogue, the cheesy special f/x, the cornball comic relief and the self-righteous sermonizing, this campy B-movie adds up to a slumming cinematic experience so godawful, it's great, in a reverse chic sort of way
Don't look to glean too much from it other than a few cool fight scenes and some funny one-liners.
What a base, and baseless, film this is.
The Condemned sprays its fury wide: media manipulators, political opportunists and technology-pacified couch potatoes are among the collaterally damaged. Paying audiences don't get off so easy either.
This is why wrestlers wrestle and actors act.
The Condemned tries to have its cake and eat it, too, alternately between a preachy scene about the depravity of reality entertainment followed by sequences of remorseless carnage, such as when Vinnie Jones guns down a roomful of unarmed people in cold bl
Designed to make you cringe from its violent scenes, "The Condemned" is a paradox of a movie.Its sole purpose is to depict people killing, torturing and raping each other. And yet it contains a preachy theme about the kinds of people who would pay to watc
Where's Richard Dawson when you need him?
Attacking the intended audience is one of those things that a filmmaker just doesn't do. Jeez!
if you're going to make a movie like this... do it right. Don't complicate things. Keep it simple, bloody, and stupid.
I was looking for a movie like this. An over the top cheesy action film. What?! I said I've been seeing a lot of overly serious movies lately. What?! Its summer, I want to see stuff get blown up. What?!
If you're going to promise audiences a death match, pony up a real budget instead of padding your plot to make us feel guilty for watching it.
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