WWE Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Please forgive the feigned enthusiasm of the slug, but really: A remake of Missing in Action? More like a remake of "Generic War Hero Movie Rambo Copycat." But I digress. All things cinematically '80s are making a comeback these days, and with Rambo getting some fresh sequels, it only makes sense that the other guys will start popping their heads out of the foxholes. Yep, according to this rather entertaining blog entry at THR, MGM and World Wrestling Entertainment (that's a guess) are concocting an all-new version of Missing in Action. And no, we're not going back to Vietnam.

Of course this is not WWE's first foray into films: They also gave you See No Evil, The Marine, The Condemned and the upcoming 12 Rounds. Oh, and Behind Enemy Lines 3: Colombia. (Any movie with a wrestler in it, basically.) Our source also indicates that the MIA remake will be produced for the DVD market and also spring from the collective pen of Jeremy Passmore and Andre Fabrizio. who recently delivered the admirably weird Special ... so this seems like quite the genre leap.

But really, if we're at the point where we're remaking Chuck Norris movies, then snark is pretty much pointless. Just give me a half-decent action movie with a ton of good mayhem, and I'll be a happy guy for 82 to 88 minutes. And hey, while they're at it, why not bang out the prequel / sequel remakes at the same time? Saves money that way! Now all they need is a director and lead wrestler.

Current Academy Award nominee and perpetual comeback kid Mickey Rourke was humbled the other day by professional wrestler Chris Jericho, who both praised and knocked Rourke's (awesome) performance in The Wrestler before challenging Rourke to some sort of match, while on Larry King Live.

Coming three days after Rourke's claim at the SAG Awards ceremony that he'd be taking part in April's Wrestlemania match (and called out Jericho in particular, it seems), I'd say that it falls right in line -- except that Rourke only sits there and offers up gratitude while Jericho gets increasingly badgering in his confrontation, in a manner that seemed scripted more and more with each passing moment (did anyone else catch exactly why Jericho threw out the word "offended" after deeming his performance "immaculate"?).

It just goes to show you that maybe not all fights captured on video are necessarily worth clicking on. Maybe it's just for the attention. Maybe it's an argument best left to those individuals. Maybe you had good reason for watching that video -- maybe you even heartily agree with one side over the other -- or maybe you were just curious. Sometimes, though, these videos are best left unwatched... a rule that doesn't, however, apply to the movie at hand. (Seriously, see it if you can, folks.)

Note: Rourke's publicist has since come forward to say that he won't be participating in Wrestlemania, and instead will be "focusing entirely on his acting career." Um, what's the difference? [via Defamer]

Every Man for Himself, and God Against All
-- Original title, The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser

And that, in a nutshell, is the pitch for The Condemned -- except, in this case, God's an illegal entertainment start-up. Broadcast wildman and snake-oil salesman Ian Breckel (Robert Mammone) has an idea for the ultimate in pay-per-view: Spring 10 death row prisoners from various Third World hellhole jails, strap them with explosive ankle-cuffs, give them 30 hours to kill each other. Last person standing wins and earns their freedom, and the whole thing gets broadcast on the internet -- at $49.95 a viewer, and Breckel's shooting for Super Bowl ratings, with all the profit for him. The 10 include a monstrous British ex-army man (Vinnie Jones), a husband-and-wife desperado team (Manu Bennett and Dasi Ruz), a swift-and-slippery martial artist (Masa Yamaguchi) ... and a late addition to the roster, Jack Conrad (Steve Austin), an American pulled from a jail in El Salvador. Conrad won't say what he was doing in El Salvador, and he won't say what his life was like before he was there ... but Breckel likes the big palooka, and enters him into the competition.

Having explosive devices strapped to you might be the ultimate action-film expression of the terrors of existence -- don't we all feel, even a little bit, like God or whomever could flick the switch at any moment? Connoisseurs of the explosive body-jewelry-fight-to-the-death genre will have noted the similarities between The Condemned and 2000's Battle Royale, the cult Japanese film with a similar pitch -- only in Battle Royale, it's 30 school kids sent off to play kill-or-be-killed, and not 10 criminals. Also, in Battle Royale, the contestants are sacrificed in the name of social order and imposed conformity; in The Condemned, it's all about ratings and money. As I've noted before, if you really want to understand a culture, watch their bad entertainment; you can learn a lot more about Shakespeare's times from Titus Andronicus than A Winter's Tale.

Just when I thought World Wrestling Entertainment couldn't be more of a joke, I learned through Fark.com that WWE's website features Jack Black -- actually his Nacho Libre character, Ignacio, aka "Nacho" -- in its roster of Smackdown Superstars. If you go to the site, Black can be found hidden among "real" wrestlers. Click on his photo, and there's all kinds of advertising for the new film from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess.

I know that WWE has become interested in Hollywood, but does Hollywood need to be interested in WWE? Maybe giving Black to Vince McMahon is payback for his giving the studios The Rock (I can't think of who got shafted, more)? Actually this is a pretty good cross-promotion for Paramount. As hard as it is for some of us to believe, millions of fans still love wresting and many of them will probably be drawn to this movie. I say WWE fans and Jack Black can have each other.

I've never been a big fan of what's known as "professional wrestling," so please forgive me if I don't greet the big-screen debut of a rassler called Kane with much enthusiasm. I am, however, a pretty staunch supporter of the horror genre, so I did hold out some hope that WWE Films could cobble together a half-decent slasher flick. To say that that hope was misguided is an understatement on par with "Michael Jackson is mildly creepy."

WWE's debut effort (and I use the word "effort" charitably) is called See No Evil, a shamelessly derivative and helplessly inept piece of genre flotsam that rips off everything from Friday the 13th to Saw 2 -- and does so in only the most tiresome and unremarkable fashion imaginable. This flick sounds like it was written by a mommy-hating nine-year-old who just discovered the joys of pointless profanity, looks like it was shot inside of an abandoned Motel 6, and feels precisely like the cynical, careless, and flimsy piece of plagiarism it so obviously is. While some horror flicks use their gritty, grungy exteriors to set a mood and create some tension, See No Evil is more than content to wander around its unconvincing soundstage, doling out nothing but atrocious acting and/or writing, desperately hoping that a small contingent of slasher supporters and wrestling aficionados will care enough to see what the thing has to offer. (Which ain't much.)