Condemned – L’isola della morte review: deadly reality show

Review of The Condemned – L’isola della morte, a film in which a group of death row inmates are forcibly recruited to participate in a reality death show on a desert island. On Rai4 and available on RaiPlay.

Jan Brekel is the producer of a ruthless, unreleased reality show that aims to reach over forty million views. But forget Big Brother and followers, because this time the rules of the game are much more extreme and even the contestants themselves did not pass the normal casting: they are essentially ten prisoners sentenced to death in various prisons around the world and forcibly taken to participate in a death match to the death.

As we tell you in review of The Condemned – Island of death, these ruthless criminals from all over the world now have a chance to avoid a predetermined fate, but they have to kill each other on this desert island, where Brekel’s team has organized everything to the smallest detail. Hundreds of cameras are deployed to watch events as closely as possible, and the webcast is expensive – fifty dollars – to knowledgeable viewers. Among the antagonists ready to fight is Jack Conrad, who was on death row in a prison in El Salvador, but is actually hiding a very different truth about his past; he will be the one to try to stop Breckel’s insane plan at all costs before it’s too late…

tick tock

A time bomb strapped to his ankle with a thirty hour time limit after which he must “have only one left” or it will explode, which can also happen with any attempt to remove it. Directly from the dynamics at the heart of references to the great classics of modern cinema, such as battle royale

(2000), here mixed with the increasingly extreme reality TV context, in an attempt to present a discourse on the obsession of the public and the sublimation of violence. In its narrative dynamics, though simple and not entirely original, Condemned – Isle of Death tries to rise above the average B-movie and offer the viewer additional incentives, even if it ends up turning almost two hours into a raw action movie based on the logic of “all for all”, between the twists and turns of the revelations are more or less obvious.

Battle Royale Review: The most important three days on the desert island of modern cinema

Violent blows

A diverse group of characters, most of which are mere accessories and are eliminated within a relatively short game time to then leave room for the main task, which sees on different sides of the fence always fascinating Vinnie Jones – it’s worse than ever – and a fighter Steve Austin, in his first leading role. The film was actually made by the film department WWE and perhaps hoped that the athlete’s career would follow the much more successful careers of now-famous colleagues such as John Cena and Dwayne Johnson. Austin, despite participating in the choir The Expendables (2010) did not live up to expectations, including because of less expressiveness compared to the names mentioned above: in “The Condemned” he is valued primarily for his massive physical grandeur, at the center of action scenes staged without infamy and without praise into a wild context where civilization is just a distant mirage.

I would like but I can’t

Among those making impromptu alliances that are about to fall apart at just the right moment, those committing new atrocities, and those among the organizers who have ethical doubts about the implementation of a program that is darker and more violent than one might expect, the film tries to give some digging to the various characters involved, but is often limited to a two-dimensional characterization with excessive shades of black and white when, especially with this type of plot, it would be necessary to blur the list of available numbers more. And here we are, with a selection of standard phrases, the trivialization of the captivating imagery at the core has been reduced in category B film perspective

crude and elementary, perhaps able to entertain the main goal of enthusiasts, but devoid of more mature and conscious ideas, sacrificed on the altar of naive second-rate entertainment that is quickly forgotten. For the finishers, eight years later, the movie had a sequel starring a different wrestler: let’s talk about Randy Orton, at the center of a standalone sequel. Condemned – the last survivor (2015), similar in opening and themes, but if possible, even less poignant at the narrative level.