Arena (2011)

So this movie just popped up on Netflix Instant, and while it's one readers have been wanting me to look at for a long time, I've been avoiding it, because, to be quite honest, I've seen enough of these forced to fight films in the 6 years I've been doing this blog, and with this one having that 2010s punchfighting angle, just didn't look like it was going to be a fun time.  But it does star Samuel L. Jackson, and a DTV film with Jackson in it is something I can't avoid, especially when it's on Instant.  Also, our friend at Explosive Action did this one too.

Arena has Samuel L. Jackson as a guy who kidnaps men, makes them fight in his brutal arena, and broadcasts the fights over the Internet for a lot of money.  He's recently kidnapped the meathead vampire from the Twilight series, and that guy is our hero or something.  Will he be able to escape and get his revenge on Jackson?



Where do we start?  Let's go with the well-worn territory of the forced to fight paradigm.  This film adds absolutely nothing to that.  If anything, it diminishes it, because it doesn't have a lot of fighting.  I'm not kidding.  It has a lot of montages of fighting, but only a few actual fights.  Then, after the montages, we're treated to montages of the woman working for Jackson who fell in love with the Twilight meathead stitching up his bloody wounds.  That seems to be what the film makers think they're adding to the paradigm, a macabre element.  What is that though?  Instead of a scene where our hero fights a guy in a makeshift construction site, we see a few seconds of it, then see the woman pulling nails out of our hero's back.  How sauteed in wrong sauce is that?  And let's look at the star, Kellan Lutz (from this point on back to "meathead from Twilight"), and why this casting decision was also sauteed in wrong sauce.  From the hair to the line delivery, this guy oozes horror movie douche or comedy romp heel, and to sell this guy to us as the hero doesn't work.  This is another example of sauteed in wrong sauce from the get-go.  My initial misgivings were entirely founded.

This is our first look at Sammy L. on here.  Can you believe that, we're almost 900 posts in, and this is the first Samuel L. Jackson.  Maybe I should've done the classic Snakes on a Plane-- I did do The Asylum stinkfest Snakes on a Train.  As you can imagine, he's great here, but he doesn't have much to work with.  At one point, he recites what's supposed to be a joke by his character, and while it doesn't work, he laughs at it, almost in a way that signals him laughing at the script.  I wonder what made him do this movie?  Yes, many great actors are going DTV now, but a lot of those movies are better than this.  Did he know going in that it would be a montage fest sauteed in wrong sauce?  I apologize Mr. Jackson, that this is your first film at the DTVC.  I'll work to rectify that soon.



I listen to the Dan LeBatard radio show podcast, and he has a segment when he's interviewing athletes where asks them about guys who do a series of things, and they have to label them "douche" or "no douche".  For instance, he had former NFL running back Eddie George on, and he asked George "guys who do credited cameos in Steven Seagal direct to video action movies: douche or no douche?", in reference of course to George's appearance in Into the Sun.  Anyway, I wanted to pose that question then to everyone here: fedoras: douche or no douche?  My Tumblr dash is split on this.  I follow a great blog called dispatchesfromnoir, where a guy writes great hard boiled pulp snippets and celebrates great pulp detective novels  He wears a fedora as a part of the whole aesthetic, and I like that.  On the other hand, there's fedorasofokc-- OK Cupid, not Oklahoma City, which was a mistake I made--, which is made up of a lot of douches who wear fedoras.  If we're using Arena as the tie-breaker-- which is probably a flawed strategy-- it looks like they're firmly in the douche camp, because they're using it here to amp up the douche level of this frat guy who watches the fights.  Man, tough call.  (As an aside, George answered "no douche" to his question, though he thought it was funny.)

So let's look at everyone else who's in the film.  We already addressed the meathead from Twilight.  Can I just say, I saw all the Twilight films with Riff Trax accompaniment, and in that capacity they were fantastic.  As the meathead character in Twilight, he worked; but as I said above, the film built him up-- and even dyed his hair-- to make him into the horror film heel, then tried to sell him to us as the hero.  That strategy makes no sense, and makes even less sense when we see Johnny Messner as Jackson's second in command.  What?  You had Johnny Messner and didn't make him the hero?  Katia Winter played the woman who got the meathead from Twilight captured by Jackson, and worked for Jackson to keep the meathead in line, until she fell in love with him.  The writing on that character, as you can imagine, was all over the place, in varying attempts to add nuance here, or make her one-dimensional there.  It was all one-dimensionality for the two Asian women that worked for and I guess were the love toys of Jackson's character-- I don't even think they had any lines.  We also had Daniel Dae Kim from the new Hawaii 5-0 as a fellow forced to fighter.  Finally, James Remar had a small bookending cameo at the beginning and end.  Love Remar, and seeing him in this made more sense than Jackson.  He must be racking up tons of frequent flier miles and hotel points going back and forth between Michigan and Louisiana for all these Stage 6 DTV flicks he's been in.



See what you're looking at there?  Yep, "Interupted".  And that wasn't the icing on the cake either, that happened right at the beginning.  That was the "I'm going to let you folks know what you're in for" moment, and it was as painful as "interupted" implied.  Mr. Jackson, I have to ask again, why did you agree to be in this movie?  Sigh, interupted.

This is a no for me.  Luckily, Samuel L. Jackson has an immense filmography for the rest of us to go to for a better movie of his, and everyone else in this movie gets to say they were in a movie with Samuel L. Jackson.    And I'm stuck watching a movie as bad as this because I decided to created a movie that specializes in DTV movie reviews.  Ugh.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1117581/