Movie Review: Marine 5: BattleGround

The Marine 5: Battleground Review by @CdnMountainMan

‘While working as an EMT back stateside Jake Carter after responding to a distress call, finds himself caught up protecting a person of interest from a biker gang ruthlessly hunting them down.’

IMDb Rating 5.2/10 Rotten Tomatoes 46%

Now we are looking at yet another installment of the WWE Studio series ‘The Marine’. This is Mike ‘The Miz’ Mizanin’s third consecutive installment as marine Jake Carter. This is however the first in series not distributed by 20th Century Fox and instead released by Sony. Both of which are pretty solid studio to distribute a movie being that they are all made under the WWE Studios banner we know we aren’t talking a monster budget probably somewhere in the vicinity of $1.5-2M.

Regardless of the budget and the distributor, the film still has a very predictable cookie cutter independant movie style feel throughout the film. We talking any major mindblowing M. Night Shyamalan plot twists. No huge surprises in acting chops from the cast considering the mainstay of them are all WWE superstars. There are some laughable moments about the performances and there are some stupid moments during the film but that is all part of the low budget, independent film style.

Now as I was looking around for things on the film there was one quick little review that really stuck out at me and I couldn’t help but laugh at it because it’s pretty much bang on. ‘Basically, The Marine 5 is The Miz in an extreme rules handicap match against the Social Outcasts.’ The only one from Social Outcasts that was missing was Ray Lappan (Adam Rose) and that’s probably only because he wasn’t employed by the WWE at the time otherwise they may have had him in there as another member of the gang.

At the very least the hand to hand combat scenes were pretty solid. They are professional wrestlers they should be able to make it look good even if they did hit each other with a potato or two during the filming. Not too many bloopers or continuity issues I actually usually find bigger budget movies have a lot more of them with the longer shooting schedules. The only major one I noticed was during a shootout was that a Desert Eagle appeared to have a fully automatic setting which they don’t have.

If you can suspend the disbelief like you do when you watch a professional wrestling match you will be entertained by the movie from start to finish. But if you are watching it as a serious movie then you would be thoroughly disappointed. Especially seeing as this is the third installment with Jake Carter how is it that he happens to find himself in these kinda situations. At least MacGyver was part of a foundation that he got called upon to do crazy things in all kinds of situations. This is just a former marine living his life back on home soil.

If you’ve seen the others in the franchise or even a couple of them then you may wanna give this one a shot. If you haven’t then you may want to watch a couple of Mizanin’s earlier installments at the very least you can skip the first two seeing as they are different characters. If you like the idea of a cheap nonsensical brainless action flick then this is right up your alley. I can’t see myself watching it again but it wasn’t the worst WWE Studios flick I’ve seen. It did appear to me more like a dragged out version of a parking lot brawl with a little bit of gunplay on the big screen. At least the melee stuff wasn’t crazy and parkour-ish a la Boone The Bounty Hunter it was a little more believable. Give it a chance and be entertained but like I say prepare to suspend your disbelief beforehand.

3 out of 5 Beards

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