Please don't spend money on this.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Some guy (who cares - he's the hero) gets abducted by one of those sinister organisations who stage online fights to the death to amuse the masses when X-Factor isn't on telly. He has to fight for his freedom, or escape, or do something like that.Let's face it, the only reason this got made is because Samuel L Jackson is in it. By and large, the acting is terrible from everyone - even the man himself. He's okay, but he could act his way through this with his eyes closed. Although why he chose to do this film while he is still being offered projects like The Avengers in anyone's guess! The fight scenes aren't bad. They have added 'cool' effect to them thanks to some trendy slow-mo, but the story (and I use the word 'story' in its loosest possible terms) is predictable and riddled with clichés (and 'twists' you can see coming a mile off). However, despite all this, the film isn't totally unwatchable.For some reason it's not that bad. If you don't mind your films pretty dumbed down and badly acted then get a couple of beers in plus an extra large bucket of popcorn, put your mind on hold and watch the (CGI) blood flow.

Some guy and his pregnant wife drive somewhere, when a car hits them. The girl dies. Now the guy ends up a drunk in Acapulco. A pretty brunette picks him up. At his hotel room she tasers him and two guys drag him away. He wakes up in a large cell. In the next cell is some Asian guy who tells him that they'll all die. Some guy in an executioner mask appears and tells our guy that he'll have to kill if he wants to live and that his new name is Deathdealer. After being tortured and teasered repeatedly, he's thrown into some green screened room where he's attacked by another fighter. It takes a while but he finally reacts and fights and beats the other guy. But since in real life he's a paramedic, he wants to help his enemy, until the executioner arrives and beheads the looser.As it turns out this is all part of an underground fighting ring that transmits the fights live over the internet all over the world. The authorities are looking for those responsible to no avail. In charge is Samuel Jackson. He's got two Asian girls running the high tech operation. The pretty brunette turns out to be a recruiter, who finds guys, kidnaps them, and offers them to Sam.She has high hopes for her guy, while the executioner thinks he has no future. Sam meanwhile offers him a deal, if he wins 10 fights, he earns his freedom. But it's only until he sees the Asian guy's girl die because of his unwillingness of to fight that he finally reacts. He accepts Sam's terms but wants the executioner to be his final opponent. The brunette helps and heals him all along.He does well in fights, but he knows well that it's unlikely that Sam will keep his word, if it weren't for the help of the girl. We also learn a bit more about his background as the story unravels.Among underground fighting ring movies, Arena is one of the better ones. And it's mostly thanks to a strong cast. Lutz and Messner do a solid job. Even Jackson, who hasn't done anything resembling decent acting in decades is actually in good shape here. This tongue-in-cheek role is well suited for him. Anything more serious is a challenge for him. But if there's one person responsible for making this movie really enjoyable it's the lovely Katia Winter. She just steals the show. And fortunately, they director doesn't mind showing all her strengths. As a fight movie, Arena doesn't really stand out, except perhaps for the fight with the serial killer. All the fights are against a CGI 300-inspired artificially-colored background and in different settings. Some of the scenes with the viewers are weak. We get some Japanese fans and well and American frat boys who stumbled onto the set after starring in a tooth-whitening commercial. Those scenes are a bit repetitive. Arena offers a lot of story for the genre. Usually movies like these are happy to have some caricature of a villain and some good guy, that's it. Arena does offer a lot more and with a humble budget.

A mysterious, underground fight promoter known only as Logan (Jackson) stages "Deathgames" in which combatants fight to the death. These bloody mano-a-mano brawls are broadcast over the internet and apparently everyone from office workers in Hong Kong to unlikable and annoying frat boys in America find Logan's product wildly appealing. When one of Logan's workers named Milla (Winter) kidnaps ex-Marine and current paramedic David Lord (Lutz) and forces him to fight for his freedom, at first Lord resists. But then Logan offers the deal that if Lord wins ten deathfights to the death, he can go, and not die. Meanwhile, he's kept in a cell far from the prying eyes of the outside world. It's there he befriends Taiga (Dae Kim), who is in a similar situation as him, but his final match will be against an executioner-type-guy known as Kaden (Messner). Will David Lord be the Lord of the underground internet deathfight circuit? Arena starts off on a bad foot right from the get-go and never recovers. It's almost like an athlete who's so pumped up that he got the ball, he fumbles immediately, and feels so much pressure to recover and make up time, he sabotages himself and can never really keep up. Right in the first few minutes, we're subjected to CGI-based fights, super-irritating frat characters that we only see from one angle as they watch their precious deathfights, and we discover, to our dismay, that our main hero, the guy we're all supposed to get behind, is a man named Kellan Lutz. Or possibly Kip Pardue, we're not really sure. Be it Kip, Kellan or Kaden, whatever, you know how it's said that couples that have been together a long time start to resemble each other, or in longtime human-pet relationships, the two start to look alike? Well, it's pretty clear Mr. Lutz has been admiring the Ryan Phillippe poster over his bed for a bit too long. If there's anyone out there who has seen every Ryan Phillippe movie ever made, it's him. While modeling your acting style and career on Ryan Phillippe might not be the world's best decision, if his goal was to be indistinguishable from him, he achieved it.The massive vacuum where a scintilla of originality might have lived is one of the more glaring problems here. This is just another stupid, mindless fighting movie that adds nothing to an already-crowded marketplace. It's filled with cliché-ridden dialogue and plot developments. Its lack of originality is even evident in its title. There are already multiple movies that exist called Arena, but apparently that didn't bother anyone involved. It's almost like they were trying to telegraph this movie's superfluity to any potential renters. (God forbid there be buyers). Okay, we don't expect total originality here, or anywhere, really, but honestly. The only dialogue we liked was the fact that the name "David Lord" was said like a thousand times throughout the course of the movie. It became funny, in a Malone or Brakus kind of way. If that's the name you're super-proud of, and not much else, there's a problem.OK, we know what you're thinking, because we were thinking it too: why in God's name is Samuel L. Jackson in this piece of crud? The only answer we can come up with is that he's a professional actor, and he likes to work. In Arena, he's a Black guy with a large underground command center, just like Keith David in Executive Target (1997). But this movie is just a knockoff of Gamer (2009) and Fatal Combat (1995) in just about every respect, so as noted previously, originality was clearly one of the first things on the executioner's chopping block. Speaking of which, Kaden as the executioner character, rather than be intimidating, is far more reminiscent of early-2000's game show character The Quizmaster from the show Inquisition. You think at any moment he's going to ask David Lord to recite the names of the Great Lakes.So we covered the childish, derivative dialogue and plot (a character even says "finish him" at one point, clearly ripping off Mortal Kombat), but the movie never explains why they put so much time and effort into getting this random guy, David Lord, to fight. Then they put him in a cell with a bunch of annoying lights and sounds, meant to break down his spirit. It ended up having the same effect on the audience. Then the brainless frat boys use their iPads and iPhones to bet on the fights. And did we mention Kellan is shirtless for about 90% of the movie? But we always try to see the positive, so on that score we applaud the fact that you can actually see most of the fights and there aren't a ton of eye-singing quick-cuts. But on the whole this movie is lame. It would have helped if they got someone good to be the hero, like a Dolph, Scott Adkins or Gary Daniels, but even if they touched Arena with a ten foot fighting pole, it would still be what it essentially is, sadly enough.The important thing to remember is that Kellan Lutz is not, we repeat, not Ryan Phillippe. Aside from that, Arena embodies almost everything that's bad about modern-day DTV "action" movies.

Godawful piece of crap direct to video flick that was somehow able to afford Samuel L. Jackson. Like a startlingly large amount of movies I watch, this is about an underground fighting tournament. Twilight sixth banana Kellan Lutz stars as a muscle-bound fireman who is kidnapped by hottie Katia Winter and dragged to an underground fighting ring where he's forced to fight to the death with other prisoners. One of them is played by Lost's Daniel Dae Kim. Jackson plays the ringleader. He has two sexy Asian ladies who follow him around everywhere. I know Sam Jackson has a reputation of doing anything for a bit of money - but I just don't see how something this schlocky could have afforded even him. It just boggles the mind that he probably wrapped this movie and walked straight to the set of The Avengers. Movies like this can be fun - look at Manborg, which I reviewed last week. That one probably was made for a quarter as much money, but it was inventive and it damn well knew it was stupid. This one is humorless and actually thinks it has something to say. What a crock.