Product: The Marine (Unrated Edition) (2006)
Rating: 1.0
Discharged
At least once a year, along comes a film that's so wrapped up in hype and promises of greatness that you know it can't be as good as its makers would want you to believe. The distinctive model of this for 2006 was "The Marine", the second feature of the newly-founded WWE Films, starring ex world champion John Cena. To state plainly, this is one godawful movie: a lame and poorly-written publicity project by Vince McMahon's sports entertainment empire that can't even be redeemed by placing it under the action/adventure genre. As a fan of both the WWE and action films, I was blown away by how uninteresting and unexciting the filmmakers could make this $23 million picture, considering that it was co-written by the same fellow who penned "Rapid Fire", "Spawn", and "Wrong Turn", and directed by a producer of WWE - a company that is built upon fast-paced action and excitement.Let's start with the focus of this debacle - the star, John Cena. Though I feel apathetic about him as a wrestler, John Cena is most definitely not up to being an action hero: lacking the talent of Sylvester Stallone and Harrison Ford, the personality of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the moves of Jean-Claude Van Dam, the humour of Jackie Chan, and even the sincerity of character of Steven Seagal or Dolph Lundgren, Cena looks woefully out of place and confused amidst the explosions, gunfights, and combat fatigues, and doesn't even have any decent one-liners to his credit to make up for his lack of presence. Essentially, he's as bland of an action star as they get.Mind you, this wouldn't really be that much of a problem if the film featured a strong enough supporting cast to make up for the star's deficiencies, but even here "The Marine" falls flat: Robert Patrick ("Terminator 2") as the film's wannabe-crazy villain and Kelly Carlson ("Player 5150") as Cena's spunky kidnapped wife are not really feeling the script at any point, and neither are the half-dozen or so supporting villains - including Anthony Ray Parker ("The Matrix") as a token black guy who alludes to being molested at summer camp for the sake of humour - most of whom kill each other before Cena can even prove himself by beating them up.Even if we were to completely ignore the shoddy acting, there is little in either the storyline (Cena is a discharged marine whose wife is kidnapped by jewel thieves) or the action sequences to hold our attention. While the film nicely portrays the depression and "lost" feeling of a soldier who has just returned home from combat, and the "man-saving-wife" premise holds some lingering potential, the vast majority of the plot descends quickly into mundaneness, and focuses mainly on the group of villains stabbing eachother in the back and the pursuing Cena having to fight off hillbillies. The action offers absolutely nothing new or innovative: though the chase scene with Cena in the police cruiser is cool, it's a dim highlight amidst mediocrity that features standard gunfights, no martial arts, and more explosions that one expects can occur in the swamps of South Carolina.In short, "The Marine" does not raise the bar at all above fellow panned WWE Films "See No Evil" and "The Condemned". If they want to be taken seriously in the realm of cinema, the writers of WWE will have to stop relying on cliché-driven pictures and name-recognition to be successful. After all, Cena's flick failed to make back its budget, as did Steve Austin's "The Condemned". Think outside of the box, huh?