While the existence of The Marine franchise may prove to be somewhat perplexing to those who tend to avoid direct to DVD actioners, you can’t deny that WWE Studios had a plan when developing the series. Considering that probably 95% of everything the film arm of the wrestling giant made was to publicise it’s main output of sweaty, spandex clad gladiators pinning each other to the mat, the idea to create an action anthology series that featured a new wrestler every time isn’t actually a bad idea.
However, when you take a look at the movies that were made, I can’t imagine anyone seeing the basic production values and simplistic plot and thinking “hey, I really want to get into wrestling now” – and that’s the real problem. The first film is actually quite fun and legitimately succeeded in bring John Cena to a larger audience, but the second film, with its downgraded budget and Die Hard-in-a-holiday-resort plot, did exactly sweet fuck all for the profile of Ted DiBiase Jr. – could Mike “The Miz” Mizanin take the third installment and follow in the footsteps of the former Doctor of Thuganomics?
Jake Carter, a man with a glittering career as an ass kicking Marine, has returned to his home town of Bridgeton near Seattle Washington and promptly wastes no time reuniting with his best friend and his sisters. However, despite enjoying a beer and a barbecue, it seems that his stint in the armed forces hasn’t stopped him from being an overprotective brother (read: controlling dick), who criticises older sister Amanda for her mismanagement of the family home and younger sister Lilly for her choice in scumbag boyfriends and an inability to hold down a job.
As fascinating as this all is, we have to tear ourselves away from all this family drama to focus on a gang of domestic terrorists led by the fatcat hating Jonas Pope as they rob a bank at gunpoint and then burn all the money they stole in the centre of the room to double down on their slightly confusing message. Anyway, we find that the hideout for Pope’s criminal syndicate is located in the rusting hulk of an old ship that just so happens to be right near where Lilly and her boyfriend, Darren, choose to hang out.
After the couple witness the vastly paranoid Pope shoot a smuggler that doesn’t live up to his high standards, the two are captured and held against their will – but not before Lilly raises the alarm to her sister. Before you know it, Jake has gotten involved as uses his training to murder his way ever closer to the syndicate’s base, but his roll is slowed when the FBI come out of the woodwork and defiantly stamp down a no Die Hard policy, stopping our hero in his tracks. But while the feds try to figure out the best way to bring Pope down, the bitter mastermind is working on an explosive plan to show those greedy rich folk that he’s got their number, even if he has to die to do it. If I were Jake, I’d better get my action hero shtick going on the double.
So it became pretty clear that with the second movie, the Marine franchise had already run itself aground despite the first movie being kind of goofy fun. Hindered by its leads inability to form actual human emotions on screen, it wasn’t able to rise above the standard, cinema bypassing, action cheapie that you could tell the director was legitimately trying to overcome. However, with the Marine 3, there’s something of an amusing Uno reverse card being played here which sees its lead actually be a noticably better actor, but the production itself be frustratingly threadbare. If there were some way to have stuck The Miz into part 2 with its larger scale and attempts at complicated action sequences, we might have had a slightly more worthy sequel, but as it stands, The Marine 3: Homefront is just another slog.
Dropping a little bit of that Die Hard attitude in favour of the small, quiet town feel of Walling Tall (another movie that coincidently saw a wrestler/actor get in the face of Neal McDonough), the third movie doubles down on the spend less, earn more attitude of franchise milking to give us our most grounded installment yet, but while the two Marine movies previous delivered an opening action scene that saw our lead actually doing Marine-stuff, here we just skip all that in favour of a puff piece that bigs up the military before shoving us knee-deep into some deeply uninteresting family drama that seems to be trying to riff off of Con Air a little without the seven to ten years of jail time. Everyone tries to pitch in to make their characters three dimensional, but unfortunately they all are let down by a script that just requires our hero to pull his big brother shit on people in a way that leaves you confused at what it’s supposed to signify. Is Jake’s behavior to his sisters a problem he has to overcome at the end of his character arc or is his overprotective nature what is able to save the day? It honestly feels like no one on set actually knows and it’s weird that such a small but important plot point can be fumbled to such an extent that it makes our hero seem like a massive prick. Of course, muting the personality of the lead actor is a baffling trait that the Marine franchise has exercised from the beginning as it smothered Cena’s natural charm by making him a bland neck snapper and does the same with Mizanin by having him not display even the slightest sense of humour and instead communicate with a succession of scowls.
The other thing you can count on from the franchise is the inclusion of a familiar character actor to play the villain, but while the aforementioned McDonough could play this role in his sleep, again, the writing of his volatile bad guy ends up being a little confusing. While I can understand that a movie bankrolled by Vince McMahon would recoil in horror of a baddie who stride into a bank and burn money, Pope’s quest to takedown the rich doesn’t seem all that bad until he starts executing people left, right and centre. In fact, the film goes to such strange lengths to stop us empathising with a man who actually has a point, it makes him arguably one of the dumbest and inconsistent villains I’ve encountered in a while. Why, if you’re so passionate about the suffering of the common man, would you whip up a plan to detonate a bomb in a place where you’re more likely to vaporise average joes than one percenters with chubby wallets? Why would you instigate a running gun battle with the FBI which slaughters dozens of them when a huge part of your plan involves dealing with them to deliver you a police car that’s vital to your plan? You could argue that Pope is making these erratic mistakes because he’s crazy, but it feels more like the writer didn’t really have an idea what he was writing about other than “bad guy hates capitalism”.
Plodding and slow, The Marine 3 holds off on the action without thinking to keep us entertained while we wait and as a result, the third entry into this rapidly tailspinning series proves to arguably be the worst. However, in a curious quirk of fate, Mizanin actually went on to become the face of the franchise for the remaining four entries, so I guess he did something right – although I’ll be buggered if I can figure out what it was.
A bit hit and Miz, if I’m being honest…
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