Starring: Rob Van Dam, Dave Batista
Well, lets see. Former professional wrestler make 80s style action movie. Shocker, surely no-one could have seen that coming. Yes, in a surprise to virtually no-one Rob Van Dam and Dave Batista's latest celluloid outing is very firmly rated in the guns, muscles, and cheesy characterfest that is the action adventure movie. Well, be honest, they were never going to be featuring in a remake of the English patient now were they? With John Cena's 12 rounds and Steve Austin vehicles Damage and The Condemned already showing there is an appetite for seeing ex-ring warriors re-enacting Arnie and Sly movies, its no wonder that its a direction that they have gone in. Its just a shame that ever with such mediocre movies to compete with, Wrong Side of Town fails miserably.
The premise, such as this movie even bothers to have one, is thus. RVD is an ex Navy Seal (aren't they always) now enjoying life as a landscape gardener. His new next door neighbour invites him and his wife to a club which he supplies wine for. The club is run by a shady character who enjoys bumping off people who annoy him. Whilst there, said club owner's brother tries to sexually assault Van Dam's wife, and in defending her, the brother dies. Said club owner now wants RVD dead. RVD ends up enlisting fellow ex seal Batista to help him. You can pretty much guess how the rest pans out from there.
Its of course the sort of set up that has been done 100 times before, but I can pretty much guarantee that in all 100 cases it was a damn site better than the way its been done here. To call the script atrocious would be to pay it a compliment. In fact, to call it a script at all is possibly overdoing it. Its a series of cliches and hackneyed lines which makes you think it was actually written by someone applying those magnetic words and letters to a refrigerator door. I could have written a better script during my lunch hour. Most movie scripts go through generation upon generation of edits to tone them up before they are filmed. If that happened here God alone knows what they started with. Perhaps someone sneezed onto a sheet of A4.
Direction is no better at all. The movie runs like its been edited entirely by accident and by someone who has never seen an editing machine before. Camera angles are all over the place, fast camera cuts make no sense and actually expose the weaknesses in the action rather than hiding them, and several scenes make no sense at all. For example, after being stalked all night by the bad guys heavies, shot twice, and beaten up, and with those same guys still hunting him, RVD returns TO HIS OWN HOME, tells his neighbour "We'll talk about all this in the morning" patches himself up, and then gets into bed with his wife as if nothing has happened. As if that isn't bad enough, he's entered the bedroom, spent 10 minutes in the bathroom banging about, and then got into bed next to her, and only when he pulls back the duvet does he discover he hands and feet have been tied up and she has tape on her mouth. Did the duvet weigh a tonne? Why wasn't she thrashing about and making a racket when he came in? Did she nod off while he was in the bathroom?
To be fair to RVD and Batista, they are easily the best thing in it. Both do as well as any two men could possibly have done with such a piss poor script and director. RVD shows good humour and a degree of acting talent in delivering his awful lines, and Batista shows both comic timing and good delivery in his bits. Both demonstrate that given a good action role they could work in movies, and Batista would be OK doing comedy as well. I could see either of them in something like the Expendables II.
However, Wrong Side of Town was never the movie to get either of them noticed. It is truly abysmal. Easily the worst film I have seen this year. In fact, I've seen better film covering a microwavable curry. I watched it on Sky in my own house and wanted to walk out.