If watching a good movie is like eating fine steak and watching a bad movie is like eating a cream puff, watching The Condemned is like eating air. How did anyone manage to make an action movie so empty?

The premise is Hostel lite. Because brown people are, apparently, corrupt and stupid, a jillionaire producer (name of Ian Breckel, which is an anagram for “an eel brick”) is able to buy 10 death-row prisoners from Third World jails and abandon them on a small Pacific island bristling with cameras to fight each other to death. The survivor is set free with a bunch of money. The jillionaire producer streams the gruesome contest live on the internet, hooks more viewers than the Super Bowl, and becomes a bajillionaire.

Even the violence lacks the courage of its gory convictions—rapes are inferred, gut-shot men die quickly and cleanly. There isn’t even any cheese-ball pleasure in watching a movie built to launch the cinematic career of Stone Cold Steve Austin—his character, Jack Conrad (anagram: “cock and jar”), is of course going to win but of course doesn’t really want to fight anybody and, of course, brings down the bloody-minded, voyeuristic, and thoroughly contemptible internet entrepreneur.

But not bloody-minded, voyeuristic, and thoroughly contemptible us. We get (and by “we” I mean “the two fat honkies sitting in front of me”) get to clap and cheer when the evil, immoral producer gets nailed and, afterward, stand at the urinals and bask in two-bit schadenfreude:

“You remember when that first guy [chuckle] got killed [chuckle]? They threw him out of the airplane and he [chuckle] got fuckin’ shish kebabed [laugh]?”

“Yeah, whoops [laugh]! That was fucked up [laugh]!”