Damage

John Brickner (Steve Austin) is starting over after spending 4 1/2 years in prison for taking the life of Mathew Reynolds. He gets a job as a bouncer at a bar when he comes to the rescue of barmaid Frankie (Laura Vandervoort). Reno (Walton Goggins) offers him underground fights. When Mathew Reynolds' wife (Lynda Boyd) tells him that she needs $250k for an operation for her girl, John needs cash and starts fighting to get it.

Steve Austin has a commanding and compelling personality. He pulls focus just by being there. He walks and talks like a pro. He could become an interesting actor. Walton Goggins, Laura Vandervoort, and Lynda Boyd are all good solid actors. The fights are good at first, but they're not shot in the most interesting way. The story isn't that complicated. This movie needs to be about the fights. Only the action directing isn't quite good enough.

I feel the first thing I should do is confess that I'm not a wrestling fan - I've hardly watched the sport, and I've never seen Steve Austin in action. Obviously, he wasn't the reason why I rented this movie. What did get me to rent it was my love of B movies - I watch them all the time. This one got me interested since it promised it would have a lot of action (fighting) in it.

Now here comes my second confession - I didn't think very much of "Damage". True, it does look pretty good for what was a Canadian low budget movie. And Austin, though he's no actor, does bring to the screen a strong presence and wisely doesn't try to be very expressive in his somewhat limited dialogue. But despite all that, I found the movie to be somewhat boring. There's far too much talk, as well as multiple subplots that slow the action from coming. And when the action does come, it's somewhat disappointing. The fights are mostly filmed with the camera zoomed way in, and with somewhat quick cuts, making the action hard to follow at times. The fights are supposed to be brutal, but I never got the feeling the fighters were suffering or in pain at any time.

This isn't a BAD movie - it's just somewhat bland and disappointing, considering they got a skilled fighter and a premise that would indicate wall-to-wall action. You can safely skip this one.

I've always liked "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, he was a brilliant wrestler, one of the best in fact, but I never thought he was a great actor, to me he was just a big man who can obviously fight, so he'll always be typecast as just that, but in this I think he proved he can act, yes it's another fight film, but I think it's also more than that, its about saving a young girls life and saving his friend, the fight scenes are ok, definitely much better than some on imdb have described, i really like Walton Goggins he's a good actor, and Laura Vandervoort is gorgeous and a very good actress.

It's a decent movie, it's not the best I've ever seen, but it isn't the worst either.

Let's just say it was entertaining.

good film overall, plot was a little generic rather similar to "Fighting" the fight scenes can be enjoyable although they all seem to be somewhat similar.It's a shame there is no real training scene as in these sort of films they're really needed, the closest thing to one is a little bit of jogging which is obviously unrealistic if he actually wants to win a fight worth the amount of money he is gambling!.

It's worth a watch, they're are better movies but i wouldn't disregard this one and would certainly watch it again. So i'm going to give this a 7/10, i think maybe a small minority are to quick to criticize when this isn't actually such a terrible movie.

In his second leading movie role, former WWE legend Stone Cold Steve Austin plays John Brickner, an ex-convict whose attempts to live a quiet life on the outside are thrown into jeopardy when he is forced into the shadowy world of illegal fighting. Though his acting skills are somewhat limited, Austin is perfectly adequate as the star of this low-key action drama; just don't expect anything groundbreaking from the execution or basic set-up. Like Austin's previous vehicle (WWE Films' The Condemned), this basically just adheres to an established action movie template (this time the 'inspiration' is the old Jean-Claude Van Damme effort AWOL), and goes through the motions of its familiar plot in an unfussy and unsurprising way. The direction is unspectacular, the fight scenes efficient but not particularly brutal, and the final result is a film that is nowhere near bad enough to despise, but nowhere near good enough to be memorable. The supporting performances are largely anonymous, though Walton Goggins (sporting the same ghastly brown leather jacket he wore as Shane Vendrell across all seven seasons of The Shield) makes the best of a badly-written part as Brickner's debt-ridden manager.