Alright, time for the introductions. Surprise! The 2011 film ARENA went straight to DVD. It was not suitable for the big screen, and is best viewed on a Gameboy pocket, if at all. It has exactly zero quotes listed on IMDB, despite having such wonderfully quotable lines like, “I so just came a little bit”, “It makes me giddy in my underpants”, and “Life sucks. Scars happen.” I’m going to go through the entirety of this movie, because I have nothing better to do. If you’re reading a review of ARENA, then clearly you don’t either.
The movie starts off like a low budget Lord of the G-Strings, with a fight scene that’s slightly more exciting than Kirk vs. Gorn. We find out that Samuel L. Jackson runs this modern day Gladiator thing on the Internet. The fifth word he says in the movie is “Fuck”, a record long for Jackson. Kellen Lutz has this hot wife that we later find out is pregnant. But then she dies when some black SUVs ram into each side of their car for no apparent reason. This causes Lutz to become super sad (what a bitch) and he almost commits suicide. We wish he had.
Then, Lutz is back on the bottle, in some bar where they speak “Mexican” as his character says. Lutz drinks a bottle of Jose Cuervo AND TWO BEERS in order to show viewers that his character is drunk. Successful, I guess. This chick, who is not as hot as his dead wife, then follows him to wherever he’s staying. What follows is stupid but ends with the chick saying that his dead wife doesn’t miss him (uncalled for), the two of them making out for two excruciating seconds, and then Lutz getting tazed by some dudes who were hiding in the bushes or something dumb like that.
We find out that the kinda-hot-but-less-hot-than-his-dead-wife chick and her goons sent Kellen Lutz to a prison where they have allocated six televisions per prisoner. They’re pretty big, and flat screen. Seems like a waste of taxpayer money to me. On the six screens the executioner explains that the dude’s name is now “Death Eater” or something like that and that he no longer has the name his parents gave him, which seems like something he doesn’t really have the authority to do. Kellen Lutz then has to fight some dude but doesn’t want to, so he doesn’t fight back until the other dude gets a knife and he has to fight back. Somehow Kellen Lutz snaps an arm off the other dude because he’s so strong. Sounds badass right? Nope, just stupid. Classic ARENA!
Then other stuff happens and there are some fighting montages that are suuuuuuuuuuuper uninteresting. The montage is interspersed with the previously mentioned about-three-quarters-as-attractive-as-the-dead-wife chick bringing in five of the saddest looking women ever to bang Lutz, and then dressing like Lutz’s dead wife so he’ll bang her. He does, and it’s weird. Uncomfortable, even. And it’s missionary only.
The movie then takes about ten minutes to slowly explain the twist to you. It turns out the whole unexplained coordinated car crash is a hit job by a bunch of dudes who do whatever, who cares and then for some reason Kellen Lutz is a spy and decides to go undercover in the hidden fighting thing that Samuel Jackson runs because the backdoor fights that his father hosted when he was a kid were boring because nobody died. This makes even less sense in the movie, believe me.
Alright, time for the outroductions. I’m trying to think of the worst part of this movie, but the only thing that comes to mind is all. All is the worst part of this movie. No characters are likeable, but all characters are hateable. The about-a-seven-out-of-ten-when-the-dead-wife-is-probably-a-ten-or-at-least-super-close chick is like always naked. Every other scene. Five total. Each one is less enjoyable than the last. I would only recommend this “film” if you enjoy getting angry at movies that make no sense at all, and even then, you might be surprised by how much anger you feel.
