The Marine 6: Close Quarters

Season’s greetings dear readers! One of my gifts for you this holiday season is my latest entry for WWE Studios’ sixth installment in their flagship franchise, The Marine! It hit direct-to-video this past month so this is a rare timely review from me! I had The Marine 6: Close Quarters (trailer) on pre-order from Amazon, but for whatever reason it took Amazon an extra two weeks to ship it to me after its street date. I hear more and more studios are doing this intentionally by delaying shipments to Amazon so brick-and-mortar retailers can compete. Just a heads up I will dive into some major spoilers that is imperative I address in the final paragraphs here, but I will make sure to give you a big, bold-faced warning so you know when they are about to hit.

The Marine films have been guilty pleasures for me. Like I have stated in my previous Marine entries, they are a throwback to the low budget action films that would dominate the TBS night with the theme, Movies for Guys Who Like Movies. Marine 6 continues that trend with a film that primarily takes place in one location with a limited cast, and as far as action films are concerned, a smaller scale for gunfights, in-your-face action and blockbuster explosions. What they lack in the AAA budget department, they make up for with the primary cast consisting of WWE wrestlers.

Unlike the previous film which was supported with lower-tiered WWE wrestlers, this film features top WWE talent. Mike “The Miz” Mizanin returns in the starring role as ex-marine, Jake Carter. He starts the film sparring with his former comrade, Luke Trapper (Shawn Michaels). Carter helps Trapper in his VA work where he delivers food to vets having a rough after-life as squatters in an abandoned building. It is there where the duo stumbles into the Hayes gang who have kidnapped Sarah Dillon (Louisa Burnham), the daughter of a juror who is deliberating the verdict of the head of the Hayes gang. The marines manage to wrestle Sarah away from the gang, but Hayes’ daughter, Maddy (Becky Lynch) leads her goons in a full-on attack against the former marines in the abandoned building complex.

What transpires is a game of cat-and-mouse as Sarah, Luke and Jake try and stay one step ahead of the Hayes gang, with many close encounters with intervening thugs they bump into that results with plenty of intense brawls and trading of fire. I liked how creative the producers got with keeping the chase interesting with the small rooms, vents and tunnels the trio found themselves in as they worked their way out of the complex. The sense of action had me glued in whenever a fight occurred, and was complemented nicely with a up-tempo score to keep me fully immersed much like a 80s action B-movie would.

Mizanin is serviceable once again in the leading role, and Michaels was surprisingly solid with his limited acting experience too. Mizanin and Michaels have a few hammed up quips they exchange throughout the film that should flop-by-all means, but their earnest delivery of them surprisingly worked for me in a adorably hammy sort of way. I would be remiss if I failed to mention the outstanding performance of one Becky Lynch. For readers here who do not follow pro-wrestling, Becky is absolutely killing it in current WWE television portraying a female badass ala “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and it is generating main event fandom among the WWE fans in a fervor the WWE has not seen in years. Becky portrays that same take-no-BS attitude in Close Quarters, and I can see it being the catalyst for how she transferred her Maddy persona onto her WWE character months after wrapping production. She is awesome in the film and successfully comes off as a believable badass I would dare not mess with.

As has been the tradition for most WWE Studios home videos, Marine 6 contains only two short extra features. Making Maddy & Marines interviews Michaels and Miz about their on screen chemistry and Becky giving props to Miz for teaching her acting fundamentals. Breakdown: Epic Fights interviews the WWE stars and the fight choreographer about how tough training was for the fight scenes and breaks down the epic final fight scene. They are nice short extras…..but c’mon WWE shell out a few bucks and give me a director and actors roundtable audio commentary track!! Speaking of short, The Marine 6 is a fun, brisk watch at 85 minutes and wraps up before you know it. That is three hits in a row for director James Nunn, whose work on Eliminators, Marine 5 & 6 I would place among the best of the WWE Studios library!

SPOILERS!!!!

Ok guys, I have to chime in with my two cents concerning the surprising moment in Close Quarters when they kill off Jake Carter!!!! I have to admit I did not see it coming and it is not that often you see a long running film franchise kill off its headlining character. The Miz takes a couple of shots to the stomach, but I kept thinking ‘he is going to shake it off’ but instead winds up worse for wear until he meets his shocking demise. This is not a comic-book film questionable death scene either because they definitively kill off Carter and make sure to show his lifeless corpse in a body bag in the film’s final moments when Luke pays him his respects. Props to filmmakers for giving a nice little ‘best of Carter’ montage during the credits, but it is kind of shoddily thrown together with a generic song and does not hold a candle to the tremendous send-off tribute to Paul Walker in Furious 7. I do not foresee the WWE stop making future Marine movies, so I am guessing this was WWE ‘passing the torch’ to Shawn Michaels to take the helm as the lead role in future installments in WWE Studios’ signature franchise.

Other Random Backlog Movie Blogs

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12 Angry Men (1957)
12 Rounds 3: Lockdown
21 Jump Street
Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie
Atari: Game Over
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Batman: The Killing Joke
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
Bounty Hunters
Cabin in the Woods
Captain America: Civil War
Captain America: The First Avenger
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Christmas Eve
Clash of the Titans (1981)
Clint Eastwood 11-pack Special
The Condemned 2
Countdown
Creed
Deck the Halls
Dredd
The Eliminators
The Equalizer
Dirty Work
Faster
Fast and Furious I-VIII
Field of Dreams
Fight Club
The Fighter
For Love of the Game
Good Will Hunting
Gravity
Guardians of the Galaxy
Hercules: Reborn
Hitman
Indiana Jones 1-4
Ink
The Interrogation
Interstellar
Jobs
Joy Ride 1-3
Man of Steel
Man on the Moon
Marine 3-6
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
Mortal Kombat
National Treasure
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
The Replacements
Reservoir Dogs
Rocky I-VII
Running Films Part 1
Running Films Part 2
San Andreas
ScoobyDoo Wrestlemania Mystery
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Shoot em Up
Steve Jobs
Source Code
Star Trek I-XIII
Take Me Home Tonight
TMNT
The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2
UHF
Veronica Mars
Vision Quest
The War
Wild
Wonder Woman
The Wrestler (2008)
X-Men: Days of Future Past