The Marine (7/10)

by Tony Medley

You pays your money and you takes your choice. When you go to see a movie like this, you should know what you’re in for. There’s going to be a lot of bad guys, and they’re going to be really bad. There’s going to be a damsel in distress. There’s going to be a surprise bad guy. And, last but not least, there’s going to be a good guy who is good and tough beyond belief.

John Triton (John Cena) is an heroic ex-marine whose wife, Kate (Kelly Carlson) is kidnapped by a brutal gang of jewel thieves led by Rome (Robert Patrick), who kills with glee and without remorse, which doesn’t set him apart from his psychopathic gang members. John takes out after them. You get the feeling that John can take on anything up to the size of a platoon without much of a problem. While credibility might suffer during his chase, it’s still fun. You will rarely see a human being with arms the size of Cena’s.

Written (Michelle Gallagher and Alan McElroy) and directed (John Bonito) with humor and pace, what surprised me about it was that the acting is uniformly good, including Cena. This is a tongue-in-cheek chase film with some absurdly unbelievable stunts and special effects, but it’s all done on a level that nobody takes very seriously.

Although there is a lot of violence, it’s not graphic in the sense that we see people’s heads being blown off. I was tired and sleepy when I attended the film, but never even felt a twinge of nodding off.

October 15, 2006