The Marine movie marathon, or legalized torture

Every now and then, I get it in my head to do up a movie marathon. I'm not talking about your usual Evil Deads or your Indiana Joneses. It has to be bizarre, sometimes loosely related movies that no sane person would ever watch one of, let alone multiple films in order.

A decade ago, it was all the Police Academy movies. All of them. Mission to Moscow? Yup. Citizens on Patrol? You bet. I watched all of them over the space of about three days in a shitty little rental wrapped in blankets while the cold air seeped in through the cracks of my misshapen doors. By the end of the second movie, I knew it was a bad idea. By the end of the last one, I was squirming in my chair, ready to be anywhere but in front of that TV. Truthfully? I really should have just gotten up and turned the damn things off after the end of the first one. But I didn't, because I have pride, damn it. Pride and a slight desire for self-destructive behavior.

Sometimes it's nice to pour a little Draino into the mind's butt canal and give everything a good cleansing. Because there's no other way to really describe the kind of pain I put myself through with these things. We're talking all the Toxic Avenger movies, interspersed liberally with such "gems" as Poultrygeist, Killer Condom, and other Troma films. We're talking all of the first six Star Wars movies... en Espanol, of which I speak literally nothing. I have more $5 JCVD movies on DVD than any one person should ever own, and I've watched many of them in order of release... with breaks for sequels to his films that couldn't even be bothered to sign him. Seriously, Kickboxer and Bloodsport 2 couldn't even be bothered to sign the guy who once punched out a snake in a film.

Flash forward to last week. It was a good time for me to take a break. I just wrapped up the first draft of my third novel. I was nervous as hell about the upcoming Kindle release of my second and I desperately needed to not sit there and dwell on it or I was going to drive myself crazy. When my brother @upperdecker invited me up to his place for a week or so to celebrate his birthday, I jumped on it. I needed time to recharge my batteries and visiting with him is always fun.

I spent most of my time up there dicking around with XCOM 2 - you can read my thoughts on that in my "games I've played in 2016" list if you want to read about actual games on a video game website (and what kind of crazy person are you, anyways?). It was a good time, but we eeded to do something memorable, to achieve something, to give ourselves horrific mental scars the likes of which we'll very likely never recover from.

As both of us are wrestling fans, this led naturally to a wildly unreasonable solution to our dilemma of "how can we hate ourselves fully?" Cue wrestling's golden boy John Cena, the seemingly vanished Ted DiBiase Jr., and (up until a very recent promo) wrestling's Captain Boring Mike "The Miz" Mizaninianiannan... Mezzanine... Mizzou... Mizanana... uh... the Miz. We were going to watch ALL of The Marine movies.

Fuck.

The Marine

a.k.a. The Film That Caused John Cena to Salute Every Damn Time He Ran at a Ring Regardless of Not Actually Being a Marine Because It's Wrestling

I respect the hell out of what John Cena has done both in the ring and as a humanitarian. The guy has done roughly a bazillion meet-ups for kids with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and has been the best face of the company in its entire history. That's not hyperbole - the dude genuinely seems like a stand-up guy.

The guy's not a bad entertainer, either, especially when he's given a looser rein on what he can and can't say. Look up his appearances on late night TV and you'll see what I mean. He's a genuinely funny dude with a pretty good sense of comedic timing that doesn't seem scripted or forced. And while he's taken a few hundred shots to the head over the years, he seems immensely normal for a WWE wrestler.

That said though, his first real foray into films was a pretty hilarious mess. The Marine falls into the action cliche tree, hits every branch on the way down, gets back to its feet, dusts itself off, then climbs back up to do it one more time - all followed by thirty megatons of explosions.

It's not so much that The Marine is unwatchable. It's entertaining in the way that it revels in its stupidity. It knows how absurd it is and it never lets the audience forget that they're always three or four minutes away from another explosion. I'm okay with that. But the movie maybe assumes that the audience is a little too stupid. Let's start with the main character's name: John Triton.

It's a thing in bib dumb action movies to name characters in really obvious plot tie-in ways - see Simon Phoenix from Demolition Man, who rises from the dead (more or less) to be born again. It's not clever. It's not as wink-and-noddish as the writers or producers would like to think. It's just annoying. "Oh, see, he's a Marine, so his name should reflect that. We can't call him Poseidon - even as dumb as our target audience is, they'll get that right away. No... we'll go with, uh, Triton! We're so clever!" If you want your kid to be a CEO someday, are you going to purposefully name him Dominic Rich Guy? No? Why would you then name a character after a Greek god? And don't even get me started on calling characters after their real world names - John for John, Bennett for Manu Bennett (Crixus from Spartacus or Deathstroke from Arrow, who slums it up here in an early appearance), etc. It's just the worst. Like my brother said upon viewing the film, it's like they didn't want to confuse John Cena on set or the audience by calling him something different. "Bob Bobberson? But that's John Cena! We're confused!"

The plot seems largely irrelevant in the short term, but hang onto these thoughts for the rest of this blog, okay? Marine X rescues Woman Y. In this case, John Cena has to rescue his wife (Kelly Carlson, who you might remember as being the crazy counterpart to Christian Troy in Nip/Tuck) from a band of diamond robbers, cop killers, and all around bad dudes. Robert Patrick leads the band of rascals as they pretty much shoot up the entirety of the scenes they're in.

Cena plays a Marine discharged from service for doing his job and saving people or something, comes home, has a happy fun sexy time with his wife in their remarkably huge house, gets a boring security job, is terrible at said job, and bemoans this fact to his wife, who suggests that rather than try to work out his problems earning bread to keep the lights on and help support her lingerie habit, they go on a vacation. Because a vacation will suddenly make him not terrible at life, right? Right. Pay attention to that theme of early marital/family problems too. It's going to come up again.

Fuck it, roll with it, says UpperDecker and me.

Things go haywire for Greek God Dude and Nip/Tucker when the Terminator, Crixus, and Other Dudes roll up to a gas station and kill more cops. Keep in mind, this is a universe where cameras exist - The Prototype John Cena was caught on camera putting someone through a glass window earlier in the film, so we know cameras exist. We know they have to be somewhere in this film. But Robert Patrick and Co. are apparently such master criminals that their pictures haven't been spread to law enforcement across the nation, let alone in the immediate vicinity o the place where they just MURDERED A CAR FULL OF COPS. Seriously, not a damn cop in this film recognizes or even flinches away from them. I'm surprised all the boys in blue aren't sitting around flinging feces at each other in the entirety of this thing.

Shit pops off when one of Robert Patrick's crew gets antsy and shoots one of the cops at the gas station in the head. They take off with Cena's wife as a hostage and he spends the entirety of the film chasing them down, taking them out, and never breaking a sweat in the bayou of Somewhere, I don't Give a Shit, USA. In the end, the guy saves the girl from drowning - because he's a Greek water god, remember? REMEMBER?!? Triton? Huh?! Huh?!? Roughly five hundred thousand things blow up, with about a full hour of slow motion shots of John Cena doing hero things like jumping in front of explosions and running in excruciatingly slow motion, because fuck plot, let's show our wrassler and never stop.

That sounds like a pretty okay plot for what the film is, right? It's a big dumb actioner, with plenty of Robert Patrick's patented gleeful dickery. He's everything you want from Robert Patrick in a Robert Patrick-ass movie, like From Dusk Till Dawn 2. Where things fall apart is when you realize just how much of a WWE movie this really is. Racism? There's a whole scene devoted to a black man who refuses to go with the smart choice of a min-van because he's black and won't drive something like that. He instead steals - you guessed it - a Cadillac because this is the WWE and there's not a stereotype they don't love. Maybe no one's actually explained to them what stereotyping actually is? I don't know. Seems like a pretty big word for some of them to have to understand.

Then there's the offhanded child rape jokes. Yes. Pluralized. In a straight-up painful scene between Cena and Carlson, he tries to joke that the last time he's been tot he woods was when his dad took him and his brother up there for some good ol' implied pedophilia. Yuuuuuup. That really plays well. The second comes from a running "gag" (emphasis on the gagging part) that the aforementioned black guy was sexually abused as a child by a camp counselor who managed to woo him with rock candy. Someone genuinely thought this shit was hilarious and included it in several points of the movie.

And that kind of defines what to expect out of The Marine in general. The blueprint for a dumb, fun B-movie is there, but the whole of it is so tone-deaf that it winds up being immensely cringe-worthy. That said? It's far and away the best of the bunch of these shitacular movies. If you plan on following in our footsteps with these things, a) don't and b) stop with The Marine. It only gets worse from there.

The Marine 2

a.k.a. Seriously, What the Hell Happened to Ted DiBiase Jr.? Is He Okay? Does He Need a Sandwich and a Coat?

I'm not sure what the intent of The Marine 2 is. Or the rest of the films in the series, for that matter, but particularly this one. Remember that line about Marine X saving Woman Y? Applies tot his film too. This time, Ted DiBiase Jr. must save his young wife from Asian terrorists who don't like white people because they've desecrated their land. I paid zero attention to this one, largely because it tries to take itself too seriously. At least it doesn't have the rampant cringey aspects of the first film.

Ted DiBiase's character is largely a bland, vanilla hero type, contemplating the end of his run as a Marine and looking at civilian life, a world he's not sure he can... wait, didn't we hear all this before? Ohhhh, right, that's because every film in this franchise basically has the same lead-up, the same archetypes, the same cookie cutter molds. Even his wife is vaguely reminscent of Kelly Carlson. It's almost a remake, not a sequel, save that it happens overseas. Admittedly, I'm pretty glad about that, because the one great highlight of the film is the cinematography, and I say that with no hint of sarcasm. The shots o the island they're on are gorgeous, and some of the long ight scenes are technically remarkable, if not all that actually exciting. Someone clearly took influence from Tony Jaa fight scenes, which is a fine influence.

Oh, and Michael Rooker's in this (Darryl's brother from Walking Dead). Why? I have no idea. His character is largely squandered as a bemused ex-soldier who buddies up to DiBiase in a ew key scenes of exposition and that's about it. Hey, it was a paid vacation to what looks like a hell of a locale, so I can't blame the guy.

I'm trying to think of anything else to say about this movie. DiBiase probably deserved better role than this. He wasn't given enough personality to judge his acting chops, and he's since sadly disappeared into the ethos. Are you okay, Mr. DiBiase? Check in with your mother. She's worried.

The Marine 3

a.k.a. In Which We Learn the Police Have Never Heard of Snipers

Let me get this out of my system. The Miz tends to bore me to tears. As a wrestler, he's technically sound and tends to protect his opponents, which I applaud. His finisher is also pretty great - I love forward Russian leg sweeps - and he's been on his game as of late working an angle with Daniel Bryan that shows him with more personality than he's given us in the whole of his career.

That said, though, imagine if a frat buddy of yours got a job on TV every week, day in, day out for about a decade. That's the Miz as a personality. He's not terrible, but there's a reason when he's announced as a former WWE heavyweight champ that I have to think back and try to recall the run of main event matches he had.

As an actor... well, he's still the Miz. Technically, there's nothing wrong with his performances. He's not awful in the last two Marine movies, but he never comes across as anything other than boilerplate, either. At least we get another great actor for him to go up against, this time in Neal McDonough, who you might remember from a run on Justified's third season as a crazed Dixie mafia middle manager.

Or maybe you remember him from the rah-rah-rah Cadillac commercial.

Anyways, McDonough's a hell of an actor. It's a bit unfortunate he's so oten typecast as a villain, because I think he'd make a great Roland for the Dark Tower - or even a Randall Flagg. Anyways, the guy's been in dozens of roles and has generally knocked it out of the park as a charming tough guy. Here, he plays a man who's tired of the system, who wants to see capitlism crumble. This might have a slightly anti-American way bent to it, but he manages to make the role pretty okay by genuinely playing up the aggrieved widower of a woman who died from being denied insurance for cancer treatments and the son of a man who committed suicide after losing everything in a stock market crash. Not a bad way to set up a sympathetic villain, and by and large, when it's just him on the screen, it really works.

And honestly, the setup for the Miz isn't terrible. He's a Marine who's having trouble adjusting to lie at home and... ah, fuck it, you know the drill. Instead o a wife to rescue this time around, the Damsel in Distress is his sister and her ne'er-do-well boyfriend with a heart of gold. The difference here in characters from the first two is largely negligible, though if I'm trying to pick diamonds out of the coal here, I'd say one of the better decisions is to have the Miz's character be slightly more unhinged and demanding than his predecessors. It's still not enough flavor to make me give a single shit about this film, but it's something, I guess.

Anyways, Neal McDonough - or Sexy Eyes, as UpperDecker calls him (and he's right - that dude was blessed with some killer eyes - is preparing to blow up an undisclosed target with some newfangled explosives in an attempt to deliver a historic message to the people that capitalism is bad. The villains are trapped in a standoff with the FBI on a wrecked ferry, and shit pops off.

Ok, shit really pops off - in an astoundingly dumb way.

Up until the midpoint of the movie, there's a hope that this thing is trying to be something more than a big dumb actioner, what with McDonough's character being sympathetic and all. But the moment the FBI decides to take him down on the ferry, things get stupid. With a single helicopter, or a sniper, or an armored vehicle, the villains' plan would have been rendered completely moot. But because the writers were apparently asleep that day or on strike or died of malaria or something, instead, we're force fed a scene wherein the FBi just sends in waves of bodies against McDonough's people, who are insanely good shots, have craploads of armor-piercing rounds, and guns a small army would envy. It's meant to be a tense, terse scene that shifts McDonough into being a real villain and a threat, and instead, it just forces the viewer completely out of whatever little sense of fictional escapism they've managed to find. It's remarkably stupid.

The movie steadily rolls downhill from there, ending with a limp yawn of a showdown that leads to the Miz driving a car loaded with explosives out to a lumber yard before it blows up in a tiny explosion that probably wouldn't have killed a kitten, let alone done enough damage to land McDonoguh's character in the annals of terrorizer history.

Oh, and in true Marine fashion, the Miz's character arc is never mentioned again outside the first twenty minutes. Perfect.

The Marine 4

a.k.a. I Don't Care About Anything Anymore. Make This Recap Stop.

We return to Mike Mizanainanaianannan's character as he prepares to take on a new job as a bodyguard for a private security firm. Good. Fine. Yeah. His sisters, his adjustment to civilian life, none of this is every mentioned again. He's apparently moved on from murderfests and gunfights to a happy normal life in no time at all.

His first day on the job, he has to drive and protect a hacker with sensitive data regarding the nefarious deeds of Private Military Company Y. Yup. Guy X protecting and saving Woman Y again. Yippee.

There's no saving grace for this movie. There are no notable actors. No diamonds in the rough. No notable progression in terms of what the filmmakers have learned. And as if by this point they've learned UpperDecker and I are watching, there's a literal SEVEN MINUTES of opening credits, text, and general inane bullshit before the movie even gets going. Whoever made this hated goodness and happiness and rainbows because there's nothing in this boring, cold turd of a movie to interest me, except for one particular bad scene near the end.

The last forty or so minutes of the film are devoted to one particularly drawn out chase through the woods, wherein Evil Mercenaries are out for our beloved heroes' blood or something. They keep flip-flopping on wanting to kill the hacker or keep her alive for reasons unknown, save that it helps create drama when she's within their grasp. I don't know, man, by this point the movies have killed my brain.

Anyways, the Miz and Damsel in Distress 4 have a night together to prepare for the oncoming mercenaries, so they spend it building traps in the middle of woods they don't know. In the dark. With limited (read: non-existent) tools and apparently four hundred feet of rope they pull out of their ass.

There are swinging spiked logs. There's a hanging snare that lifts a mercenary forty feet in the air. There are intricate "got ya!" traps that require knowing there will be two mercenaries side-by-side at precisely the right moment walking through a very narrow pair of trees at precisely the right moment. There's all the dumbest fucking shit you'd expect from something labeled a WWE film.

At least Marine 4 had one bright shining moment - it was the end of our horrible decision to watch all of these remarkably crappy movies. For that, I'm eternally grateful to it.

Kids, like the WWE always says, do not attempt this at home.