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Title: The Marine: Unrated: Widescreen

Region: One

Genre: Action

Stars: John Cena, Kelly Carlson, and Robert Patrick

Writers: Michell Gallagher and Alan McElroy

Director: John Bonito

Feature length: 91 minutes

Extras: The Making Of The Marine Featurette, John Cena Featurettes – Encompassing Cena’s Personal Profile, Military History, Basic Training and Cena’s Aussie Day Off, The Marine World Premiere at Camp Pendelton, WWE Promotional Featurettes: John Triton Profile, Fight Scenes, Cena Stunt Work, The Marine: Fans React! Explosion/Action Scenes

Languages: English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound and French and Spanish Language Dolby Surround Sound

Subtitles: English Closed Captions and English and Spanish Language Subtitles

Packaging: Amaray Keep Case

Chapter Stops: 20

Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound and Dolby Surround Sound

Year of Theatrical Release: 2006/DVD Release: 2007

Theatrical Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox

Home Video Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment

MPAA Rating: Not Rated

Reviewer: Mark A. Rivera

There was a brief time when I got into watching WWE RAW and Smackdown because a friend of mine was teaching as a substitute teacher at some local high schools and basically he heard the students talk about it made him curious. My friend always had an interest in wrestling too so one night I was talking with him on the phone and he started laughing so I asked, “What are you watching?” and he said turn on channel 40 and I had not followed professional wrestling since the days when it aired on a Saturday afternoon and it was aimed at kids so I was surprised at how much it had changed. The reality of professional wrestling in the WWE is that the outcomes are predetermined, but the actual movements the wrestlers do are dangerous. They do take bumps as can be seen readily when one falls into the steel stairs, etc. Couple the danger with the fact that while the outcomes were predetermined, the audience didn’t know that and then add to that the variety of characters the WWE had back then. There was Mick Foley as Mankind/Cactus Jack, The Undertaker, Kane, The Big Show, The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin as well as one of the all time great villains of the WWE and a damn good wrestler as well, Triple H. The storylines were silly, but to me it was like watching superheroes and super villains fight each other on a weekly basis. Vince McMahon was a great ringmaster as well and then it was always great to hear the announcer J.R. start yelling at the top of lungs as he narrated the action on screen. The ladies of the WWE often looked like swimsuit models or top of the line porn stars and some of them were just as tough as their male counterparts when it came to taking the bumps in the ring.

Then after acquiring what was WCW from media mogul Ted Turner, the roster of fighters became so large that they started assigning certain stars to RAW and certain ones to Smackdown and slowly but surely the WWE got boring. Right before I stopped watching the WWE John Cena was just being introduced and he would come out and basically say some rap rhymes and one could see right away that this was perhaps the most interesting character leftover since many wrestlers end up having to retire for various reasons. Many do not realize this, but these guys are constantly on the road and week after week their jobs become increasingly strenuous. Very few wrestlers become Hollywood stars and with bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger now serving as the Governor of California, the race to become America’s next great action film hero has been tight. Even The Rock has not reached the heights of Arnold and quite honestly Arnold Schwarzenegger outside of Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines was no longer the box office titan he had become in the 1980s and early 1990s. So the WWE and other sports entertainment outlets have routinely become places where Hollywood has looked to find the next great big screen action hero.

Everyone has to start somewhere and while I am not really into action pictures like The Marine so much, I am glad to see that John Cena has been given a chance and am willing to forgive any shortcomings because this is a popcorn film for WWE fans and high school kids to go and enjoy. I imagine the film will do better on home video anyway. As for whether or not John Cena is America’s next big action hero? Who knows? The market has changed so much that many stars have had to recycle old characters and franchises in one form or another in an attempt to remain relevant to a generation that has cell phones in grammar school, pocket PCs more powerful than desktop PCs in the 1980s, and purchase their music on I’ Tunes instead of buying CDs. For them, a Sony Walkman would seem antiquated and by the time their kids are teenagers, figure in about twenty years, home video will have completely made the transition to video on demand just as the music industry has. We live in interesting times, but the future will be wild.

The Marine is actually part comedy with some of the violence done tongue in cheek style with Robert Patrick giving one of his lackeys a quick stair when one of the criminals describes John Cena’s character as being like The Terminator. Props go out to Anthony Ray Parker who plays one of the killers, but has some of the best dialogue in the movie. Cena seems stiff at times and one wishes he had loosened up a bit for the film, but I guess in part because this is his first action picture, Cena is just learning. To cover his shortcomings as an actor, the Director just places Cena in one impossible action sequence after another. They are quite unintentionally funny, but again, I think the idea of mixing humor and over the top action was good. I just don’t think they got the right balance. Never the less, viewers can thrill and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all with scenes that include:  

WWE champ and commentator/host Jerry “The King” Lawler has an uncredited cameo in the film and the films ending credits roll to John Cena rapping.

There is perhaps a 16 second difference in runtime between the theatrical and unrated widescreen versions of the film, which are presented in a gorgeous glossy 16 by 9 enhanced widescreen (1.85:1) aspect ratio with a lively English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Soundtrack. French and Spanish Language Dolby Surround Soundtracks are encoded onto the dual layered disc as options as well as English Closed Captions for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired and English and Spanish Language Subtitles. Before the main interactive menu appears there are letterboxed trailers for Touristas, Bandidas, and Flyboys (1:52). The main menu features motion scenes from the film while the subsequent menus are all standard still frames that are east to navigate.

In some ways The Marine is like a reinterpretation of Commando and it is not surprising that in the trailers section, there is a (1.33:1) trailer for that Schwarzenegger action vehicle (1:50) along with a 16 by 9 trailer for The Marine (2:11) and a letterboxed trailer for Man On Fire (2:02) along with a Fox Action TV on DVD spot (2:02) for Prison Break, The Unit, and The Shield. There are also ten WWE promotional featurettes, which are really more like extended TV spots that can be viewed individually or as one reel (14:38), a making of featurette (11:28), another collection of John Cena featurettes (15:28) and footage from the World Premiere at Camp Pendelton (2:37).

Overall, for a standard DVD release, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and the WWE have put together a nice disc with some better than average bonus materials, great picture transfer and a good action picture soundtrack. Just relax and enjoy it for what it is. The Marine: Unrated: Widescreen DVD is available now at retailers on and offline courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

© Copyright 2007 By Mark A. Rivera
All Rights Reserved.

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