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STUDIO: 20th Century Fox
MSRP: $14.99
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 95 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
– Extended scenes
– Deleted scenes
– Production featurettes
– Steadicam and handlheld takes of fight scene
The Pitch
The sequel to the de facto remake of Commando.
The Humans
Ted DiBiase, Temuera Morrison, Lara Cox, Robert Coleby, Michael Rooker.
The Nutshell
Joe Linwood (DiBiase) is a Marine who’s seen a little too much action recently. While on leave, he joins his wife at a resort in Southeast Asia where she’s working. Their plans for a relaxing vacation are shattered when local rebels storm the resort and take everyone hostage. It’s then up to Joe to pull a John McClane and try to save the day.
The Lowdown
The
production value of this direct-to-DVD film is actually quite good.
The picture looks nice and there’s great imagery of the island resort
where they shot. And that’s about where the compliments for the film
end. It’s not that The Marine 2
is a terrible movie, because it’s better than much of the
action dreck out there. It’s just that it’s so paint-by-numbers for
this type of film that there’s nothing to surprise nor really rate a
look-see. Although director Roel Reine has one or two interesting
action pieces, the rest of the film follows the Die Hard playbook to a fault. Plus the writing and acting is so blase that it’s hard to root for either side to win the damn thing.
DiBiase knew that if Hogan realized he was about to get a hollow point in his melon that he’d agree that Wrestlemania IV payback is indeed be a bitch, brother…
Headlining in his first major film is WWE wrestler, Ted DiBiase, son of the Million Dollar Man (who was easily one of the best villains of the last 25 years for the company). But Ted, Jr. is his own man…unfortunately it’s just not one that’s particularly interesting here. DiBiase was actually a replacement for major WWE heel, Randy Orton, on the project. When Orton went down with a legitimate injury, young Ted was called up to the major leagues. Here he’s depicted as a troubled Marine who’s seen a little too much action recently, with the death of a kid weighing heavily on his conscience.
“No, I won’t do that, Joe. That’s disgusting.”
“Oh you’ll do it, baby…everybody’s got a price…”
His wife, Robin, works for the pompous owner of a resort in Thailand and they end up taking a working vacation as the resort opens. Add a dozen or so nationalistic rebels who take over the place to fight off the influence of the white man, and you have your boilerplate John McClane situation set up. From there on it’s pretty much everything you’d expect, Linwood has to take out most of the terrorists one by one (or in the best action sequence in the movie, two at a time). DiBiase can handle the action just fine, since that sort of thing is his bread and butter. But I couldn’t really get a since of his capabilities because I think somewhere at the beginning of Act 2, his character was replaced by a pod person who went through the entire film barely emoting. He never even got a cheesy one liner, at least not one that sticks with me.
“The wife and I are having some issues. You got any advice, Church?”
“Sure, inject them with some alien shit that turns them into a house-sized womb that explodes and produces thousands of sluglike creatures that seek out and infect other humans in an effort to spread your oneness across the known universe.”
“Yeah, not sure she’d go for that…””
Director Reine must have thought he was doing Black Hawk Down 2 instead of The Marine 2 because he makes copious use of the gritty slo-mo gun battles. He also turned the entire film, well, dour. It had none of the whacky elements of the original, which was part of that film’s ridiculous charm. Plus, what was sorely needed was a scene-chewing villain, and Temuera Morrison is pretty far from that. Michael Rooker is his usual charming self, but I’m thinking this was little more than a paid few weeks in a tropical setting for him at most.
A film like The Marine 2 is essentially Die Hard at an Asian resort. That’s obvious before you even see it. But when it lacks anything distinctive of its own, it merely becomes Paul Blart without the meager laughs of that film and a slightly bigger body count.
“Goddamned Jedi! This is for Geonosis!”
“Dude, what the fuck…?!”
The Package
As mentioned, the film does look quite good, but as also mentioned, that’s about it. Sound is also fine. In terms of features, there are the standard extended and deleted scenes, and a series of six standard production featurettes that total about a half an hour. There’s also some outtakes from the Muay Thai fight between DiBiase and two bad guys that feature multiple takes with steadicam and hand-held. That would have been fine, except they do five takes of the former and four takes of the latter and they’re each the exact same take, which gets pretty repetitive pretty quick. You want a real sequel to The Marine? Rent 12 Rounds instead since it’s the exact same movie.