Samuel L Jackson Month - Mini Review - Arena

It’s Samuel L Jackson Month

We’ve seen Samuel L Jackson as a veteran, we’ve seen Samuel L Jackson as a jackass, we’ve seen him as a coward, now let’s take a look at him playing an outright villain.

No, we won’t be covering that one this month, although it may come up as a possible future review. My feelings are that I do not have enough expertise on Will Eisner’s work to give that movie the thorough trouncing it deserves – watch the Bad Movie Beatdown/Atop the Fourth Wall crossover if you want to see people’s work that matters on the subject. In the meantime, let’s look at Arena

Made on a modest $10m budget (no idea about performance figures) Arena did not go down well with audiences, a 27% rating on rotten tomatoes with an average 2.5/5, the one critic whose review is on the site gave it a 0/4.

What do I think? Well, I don’t think this movie is good but 0/4 would imply to me that the movie fails on even the most basic of levels and to be honest, it isn’t. For what it is, it’s not badly written, and some of the characters, some of them, are actually interesting to watch.

The problem is it’s incredibly unpleasant. The plot is that several months after losing his wife and unborn child thanks to people in a black van, David Lord is abducted by a woman working for an online broadcast fighting tournament. He wins the first fight largely in self-defence but finds himself with a proposition. He wins 10 matches and he can go free but may end up sacrificing his humanity in the process.

There’s really no-one to root for in this episode. Sure you start off rooting for David Lord but that bit I said about losing his humanity, that’s more or less what happens in the movie. The fights are brutal, bloody and downright unpleasant to watch, and you know David is being manipulated so it’s hard to root for him.

Giving the bad guys have engineered a sick twisted murder game that airs online it’s no surprise that wide variety of asshats are watching it. F*ck all of them in every conceivable way and why wasn’t that guy working at the office ever caught and fired along with the rest of his douchebag colleagues.

Anyway, Jackson plays the main villain of the piece, named Logan, he’s a money-grubbing coward and there’s not much more to him. His downfall comes as the result of a twist brought in only a few minutes before the end of the film. Guys, if you’re going to pull this kind of twist off, you need to reveal it earlier and have it have consequences on the main characters, instead it feels more like a deus ex-machina to end the movie, with the only thing it explaining from the past is the whole black van bit from the beginning.

One positive I can give it is that it uses what little budget it had decently, the live broadcast online fight gave an excuse that works for not especially brilliant green screen effects and the majority of the fight is largely practical effects, with the rest being used for the screens.

It also has fanservice for those men who like naked women in their action movies, it’s rated 18 for a reason, well, the bloody, gory violence also helps with that.

No motherf*cks that I heard, so our count remains at 14, can we get any higher with our last 2 movies, well, join us next time and find out

Rating 25/100

For initial thoughts on movies, comics and video games as well as exclusive updates, click here to like my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter @rageformedia

For more reviews click here

Images/clips used in this review are from Arena, The Spirit and Avengers Assemble (The Avengers) and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use