Anytime, and I mean anytime, a manipulator tries to get prisoners or captives to do anything, it is absolutely inevitable as far as the movies are concerned that those prisoners will turn on that person. It is. They just can't, um, escape it.

So in "The Condemned", which is sort of like "Survivor" with death row inmates, you just know the entire tv crew is going to get it at some point. Why these people don't protect themselves to the hilt is anybody's guess.

"The Condemned" asks this simple question: what if "Survivor" creator Mark Burnett started smoking crack but still had the power to produce live tv? Ian Breckel (Robert Mammone) has come up with the idea to take ten condemned prisoners from around the world, throw them on an island, and then free the last one alive. The entire thing is filmed and streamed onto the Internet where the violence-hungry public will pay $49.99 to watch it all.

Personally, I think it would have been a better movie had they taken unwitting politicians and thrown them onto an island and had them fight to the death. After all, who wouldn't want to see Harry Reid and Dick Cheney kill each other? Naturally, there are a whole bunch of standard types like a Nazi and a huge, hulking Russian, a martial artist; etc. What the producers don't realize is that their last minute replacement, Jack Conrad (Stone Cold Steve Austin), is a special ops soldier who's not an indiscriminate killer and much more interested in getting off the island.

The prisoners have 30 hours to resolve their differences or explode (there's a bomb anklet). Violence aside, the film's various borderline continuity errors are a source of much amusement. For instance, we see a map of the island and where the prisoners are dropped. If I were the producer, I would make sure that they were more than 30 hours from wherever I was thereby preventing any escape. In what seems like about 15 minutes, Conrad has traversed the entire island and is breaking into Breckel's compound.

My favorite scene though, involved Breckel's demise, which is inevitable, of course. Breckel goes running for his helicopter in one direction while Conrad breaks off to deal with his nemesis, Ewan McStarley (Vinnie Jones). We assume Breckel is running the entire time and hasn't stopped for a burger, but after Conrad does his thing, the next scene features Conrad running after Breckel, merely a few hundred feet behind. Maybe Rosie Ruiz wrote the screenplay.

It won't be long before we see this film condemned to that $3.99 bin at the local DVD store.