WWE star Ted DiBiase Jr. (the son of The Million Dollar Man!) makes his big screen debut in this follow up to the 2006 film, The Marine, which starred John Cena as a Marine named John Triton. This second film puts DiBiase in the role of a completely different Marine named Joe Linwood. When we meet Joe, he's somewhere in Asia (we're never really told where, or for that matter, why) on top of roof with one of his fellow soldiers. Shortly after they're done looking around, a nefarious arms dealer guy launches a grenade at them and somehow manages to take out a little kid who was hanging out up there all along.

After all of this build up that doesn't really go anywhere, Joe decides to take a vacation for a few days. He and his foxy wife Robin (Lara Cox) head to Thailand where her boss, Darren Connor (Robert Coleby), has built a fancy resort. She's planning a big party there in his honor, so this seems to be a good enough excuse for Joe to tag along, you know, just in case something should happen - and it does, in the form of a gang of evil terrorists lead by Damo (Temuera Morrison). They crash the party and take Robin hostage along with her boss and a bunch of other rich people who the audience is really never seemingly meant to feel sorry for.

This mixed bag of international terrorists, who don't appear to share much commonality including national origin, refer to one another as brothers and never really explain why they're taking these hostages outside of some demands for large sums of cash. Maybe that's motivation enough. Regardless, Joe is pissed. He's not just going to sit idly by and let terrorists of no discernable allegiance kidnap his hot wife, he's going to take matters into his own hands. After all, he's one of the few, the proud... the Marines. As such, he gets ready for action and teams up with an older Marine named Church (Michael Rooker) who just happens to be in the area. From there, he kicks people and shoots people, eventually duking it out with a Muy Thai fighter, all in the name of getting his woman back in one piece.

Outside of Michael Rooker's small part in the film, The Marine 2 is remarkable in how wooden it is. No one here, including the headlining DiBiase, shows any enthusiasm for the work. DiBiase in particular channels that sort of Chuck Norris style of cardboard acting with surprising accuracy, which isn't the only way that this picture resembles a Cannon Films eighties era actioner. Like many of those films, the plot is really little more than a series of action set pieces strung together by the thinnest of threads. The American protagonist is unflinchingly noble and bad to the bone while the Asian antagonists are stereotypes in much the same way that the Middle Eastern villains so common in Cannon's output also where. It's as if writers Christopher Borrelli and John Chapin Morgan found a few notes from an unused Missing In Action sequel, changed the location to Thailand and changed the missing POW's to business types and replaced Norris with DiBiase. In short, it's nothing even remotely original or anything that action movie buffs haven't seen over and over again.

That said, as flawed as the film is, as far as mindless shoot'em ups go, you could do a lot worse. DiBiase does handle himself reasonably well in the action scenes, grimacing his way through firefights and pummeling his way through some hand to hand action scenes with, not so much grace and style, but at least a bit of screen presence. If you've seen him on WWE Monday Night RAW (where he's currently part of the Legacy tag team) you know he can ham it up when he needs to and he puts those skills to use here. He's not a good actor in the traditional sense but he makes for a fun action hero as long as you can look past any sort of need for convincing emoting. He doesn't have much chemistry with Ms. Cox but he doesn't really need to, her character is nothing more than an excuse to let him loose on the bad guys. A bit more action and some tighter editing could have helped things a big, but there's enough mayhem and violence here that the film works as a mindless hour and half of escapism.

Video:

The Marine 2 arrives on Blu-ray in an anamorphic 1.85.1 widescreen presentation with AVC encoding in 1080p high definition. The Thai locations look nice and offer occasional of color and texture to ogle in the background, but a lot of times the colors look intentionally unsaturated. Sharpness is inconsistent here and some shots look pretty soft. Skin tones are good, if leaning towards the hot side of things periodically, while black levels remain dark - almost too dark, as sometimes the detail gets demolished. There aren't any compression artifacts or edge enhancement issues of note, but there are instances of ringing throughout and some of the darker scenes look a bit noisy. This has got to be an upgrade over the SD release, you can see a pretty impressive level of detail in close ups and sporadic medium and long distance shots, but it's nothing to really right home about compared to plenty of other Blu-rays out there on the market.