ARENA WARS Review: Perfunctory Action Schlock & Awe
Arena Wars opens in North America on June 25 from Gravitas Ventures.
It’s admirable that there are still directors out there keen on committing themselves to action cinema nostalgia. As always though, it’s a crapshoot each time and particularly when it comes to the dystopian death game genre. To that end, there are plenty of examples with tons of positives to pull from depending on your tastes.
Films like The Running Man, the Battle Royale movies, The Hunger Games films, the Jason Statham-led Death Race, and even The Hunt are all terrific cases in point. Suffice it to say, there are others that fare even less. Dallas Jackson’s more grounded The System is probably the best title in this category I’ve seen as recently as last year, and that’s coming off of covering the gravely subpar U.K. indie, Exiled: The Chosen Ones.
Although Brandon Slagle’s Arena Wars fares a wee better in its presentation, there is little violence and gore, and acting so dire in its amusement that can keep this film afloat. I tuned out more than I wanted to, which is a shame, because a film like this is the kind that’s supposed to be up my alley.
It’s a movie set in the year in 2045, immersing us in “The Big Fucking City” where prison is the center of the latest for-profit entertainment spectacle. The titular event in question is run by a corrupt tycoon named Belladonna (Kevin Hager), who nowadays is on a mission to find a way to get the ratings up – that is, when he’s not busy enjoying the show along with some Nyotaimori on a beautiful woman who can’t get off the table fast enough.
With Arena Wars, prisoners are forced to stare down a gauntlet of crowded fight arenas from room to room and square off with an eccentric laundry list of colorful kill-squad members, each donning masks and costumes as part of the allure. One such contestant, ex-Marine and parole reject, Luke (John Wells), finds himself cajoled into accepting an offer to compete along with a small group of death row inmates.
Once at the venue, Luke is placed at the center of the hype when the show’s raspy-voiced and grisled MCs reveal Luke’s past to the world. Alas, Luke has no choice but to play his position and strategize if he and his fellow inmates are to make it out alive.
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The most entertaining facets there are about a movie like Arena Wars is that it’s dressed basically to appease anyone who’s part of the generation that grew up watching The Running Man as a kid. The costumes and personalities of the kill squad members are wacky and right out of the B-action movie playbook, and Wells’s lead role as a stoic, self-sacrificial ex-soldier who punches walls just to take his brooding rage out on something makes him prime for the taking.
The inmates Luke fights with are a bevy of different times, some more helpless than others. A few of them are Kahn (Johnny Huang), the innocuous comic relief who runs a little less on comedy as the fast talking drug dealer handing out freebies to his fellow cohorts just to score favor, and Billie (Kylie Fulmer) is a former MMA champion.
The movie eventually unravels a dark twist that forces Luke to confront a terrible realization. It’s a lynchpin that should be a motivating force for Luke to garner the kind of sympathy a role like his commands as the underdog. What honestly kneecaps it is unsubtly dull cinematic framework built around it.
The gory action and violence ought to be plenty intriguing seeing as one guy gets stabbed in the head, other dudes get burned, bludgeoned, or sliced by blades and one major antogonist gets a chainsaw at the waist with ample blood splatter to whet the appetite. Regardless, you’re left wondering what it all means as the film routinely interacts between a pair of hosts who look like they’d rather not be there, and a small studio audience of cringe fans who bookend the film with an even more cringing chant.
Moreover, not enough was done to develop Luke’s character for me to get behind him. Writing a war hero into a story that should have seen him go head-to-head against the kind of systemic top-down force of economic evil – or something close to it – is what Arena Wars should have been, or could have been. At any rate, you’re welcome to rent this one if you so choose to, but it’s safe to say that Paul Glaser did it better.
Native New Yorker. Been writing for a long time now, and I enjoy what I do. Be nice to me!
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