Marine, The (2006)

 

    There's a long history of wrestlers becoming actors, some are good, i.e. Andre The Giant in The Princess Bride, or The Rock in GridIron Gang, others....not so much, see any of Hulk Hogans ouevre, or more accuratly don't.   The current WWE Champion John Cena is now primed at Hollywood to be the next big name to make the transition from the squared circle to the silver screen.   Now it's just a question of, is it any good? 

 

Smarts

25%

 

       In The Marine, John Cena stars as the 'cleverly' named character John Triton, a Seargent in the U.S. Marine Corps who is discharged after saving his platoon from a terrorist cell in Iraq against orders.  He goes home, and has a brief stint as a security guard, before going on a trip with his wife played by Kelly Carlson.  At a gas station the two run afoul of a group of criminals led by Robert Patrick (Terminator 2), and his wife is kidnapped by said criminals.  He then narrowly escapes the gas station exploding and proceeds to track them down to rescue his wife.

 

     So basically, this is just a by the numbers action flick, one that doesn't usually get put into theaters anymore, and would probably go direct to video if this was The Marine starring Jean Claude Van Damme rather than John Cena.  John Cena himself is a passable actor, though the script really only calls for him to dodge explosions and fight a few people, which he does every week on WWE Monday Night Raw, minus the dodging explosions part.   Robert Patrick falls back on his 'classic' Double Dragon villian role and chews the scenery to some amusement, and Kelly Carlson just looks pretty and screams and gets knocked out a lot.  The rest of the cast however has even less to do, other than Anthony Ray Parker (The Matrix) as Morgan, the trigger happy mentally unstable henchman.   Sounds like a twisted children's book doesn't it?  

 

   The directing by John Bonito, making his film debut after working with the WWE is good in the action scenes, he knows how to frame them with the cinematographer to make them look good, though you would hope so since this is normally what he works on anyway.  But the rest of the film, well I'd say the pace drags but this is pretty much non stop action after the plot is set up, so he does a decent job directing action.  

 

 

   I'd say the weakest part of the whole picture is the score by Don Davis, who gave us the brilliant scores for The Matrix trilogy, in the action scenes again, it's a fairly forgettable score with no memorable theme, but then in the non action scenes it's just make you bleed from your ears awful, like a low grade adult film score.      And the soundtrack even includes at one point White Zombie's, More Human Than Human, a song that was in pretty much every action flick trailer and a few movies I believe from 1995-1998, just to reinforce that this is an action movie. 

 

 

 

Popcorn

50%

 

     The Marine is basically a by the numbers, predictable action flick, like I'd mentioned before, but it is entertaining for the most part, I'll give it that.  There are some pretty cool action scenes going on in this flick, and at least two "Daaamn" moments, moments that make you just say, well "Daaamn" that was awesome.   I think my favorite of the sequences was the climax of the picture, with John Cena hanging from the truck and his dispatching of one of the last remaining villians.    If you go to see this movie, you're seeing it for the action, and in that you won't be dissapointed, it's entertaining in the sense of a movie you'd watch on Saturday afternoon on tv, which would actually be the best place to watch it.   It's got all the cliches of an action flick, so if you go into it with your brain fully turned off you can enjoy it fully, I wish I could have done the same, but there are some parts that even I couldn't turn my brain off for.   

 

Final

 I will say that this movie is better then The Rock's Walking Tall, but that's not really saying much.  There's plenty of action and a few attractive woment to look at, so it's basically a movie for the typical WWE audience, not that there's anything wrong with that, I was just hoping for a little more with this flick.   My best bet would be to wait a few years till it hits cable.   Well till next time, be sure to keep it reel.