The Marine: Movie, DVD, Blu-ray disc Review (2006)

DVD, Blu-ray Movie Review

"The Marine"

By Christopher Smith

John Bonito’s "The Marine" is almost exactly the sort of B-movie that used to be the standard for stock action cinema in the ’70s. The difference? It has bigger, better special effects — from the explosions straight down to the characters.

The story is filled with assembly-line nonsense, but few coming to it will give a hoo-rah that it offers nothing new. What will matter most to its target audience are whether the ammo, action and attitude are in good supply.

The short answer is yes.

The film, which Bonito based on a script by Michell Gallagher and Alan McElroy, comes from World Wrestling Entertainment, with Vince McMahon serving as the movie’s executive producer. That will either excite you or leave you wanting to spend a long time surrounded by art and books, as will the idea that the Marine in the title is played by John Cena, the WWE superstar known for his quick wit and, well, other attributes.

What the movie has going for it is that it understands what it is — cheap entertainment that takes itself just seriously enough to allow room to poke fun at itself. Since the movie makes an attempt to be somewhat timely, it opens in Iraq, with Cena’s John Triton eager to free several fellow Marines who are about to be executed by al-Qaida.

With panache, he pulls it off — the amount of firepower the man unleashes in this scene alone would put a smile on Kim Jong Il’s face — but there are consequences to Triton’s heroism. Since he refused to follow orders and wait for backup, he is discharged from service and is forced to become a restless civilian back home in South Carolina. There, he romantically reconnects with wife Kate (Kelly Carlson) before finding dissatisfying work as a security guard, from which he’s quickly fired for some rather inappropriate behavior.

With a vacation in order, John and Kate take off for the mountains, where they have the bad luck of meeting up with some vicious jewel thieves (Robert Patrick, Abigail Bianca and Anthony Ray Parker among them) who take Kate hostage. It’s up to John and John alone to use the skills he learned as a Marine to get her back.

On the surface, it’s easy to dismiss a movie like this, but in 2006, Hollywood has pumped out a lot worse than "The Marine." The movie is a cartoon, but it’s reasonably entertaining, it accomplishes its low goals with a measure of menace and humor, and Cena and company work hard to infuse the film with its likeably cheap, movie-of-the-week feel. Hardly great, but also hardly awful.

Grade: C+