Welcome to Sudden Death Parent Guide

Jesse had a storied career in the US special forces, but his life has changed a lot. Now with a wife (Sagine Sémajuste) and two young kids, Mara (Nakai Takawira) and Ryan (Lyric Justice), to provide for, Jesse has taken a job working security at the local arena. The downside of the job is that he’s spending a lot of time away from home, and he misses the opportunity to be with his family. Thankfully, he’s got an understanding boss, who helps him get two VIP passes to bring Mara and Ryan to work with him for the big game. But he’s not the only one with plans – a group of deranged terrorists led by “Alpha” (Michael Eklund) have their own idea of how the day should turn out.

Netflix is clearly becoming dangerously desperate for content. The effects of the current pandemic mean that producing new content is difficult or impossible, so Netflix is buying up existing properties – but that’s a limited resource. I would say this is scraping the bottom of the barrel, but I think we passed that some time ago. This is scraping the earth’s core.

Welcome to Sudden Death is a prime example of inexcusable writing, acting, and production. Everything about this movie is a catastrophe. The writers have a truly remarkable ability to make human characters sound like bad artificial intelligence algorithms. Worse, they keep sprinkling in modern slang which they clearly do not understand, which makes their characters sound like someone’s “cool uncle” trying too hard to sound young. The abysmal writing isn’t helped by the actors, who I hope would be cut from a high school play for gross incompetence. Frankly, anybody with a credit in this film should probably never be hired again

This movie is a rip off of a bunch of other action features, namely Snake Eyes and Die Hard. It also claims to be a sequel to the 1995 Jean-Claude Van Damme violence-fest Sudden Death. The problem is that none of those movies are particularly good in the first place, and this one is far worse. At least with the originals, the fight scenes would be well choreographed and visceral – here they feel like an unhinged six-year old bashing his GI Joe toys together. The advantage to watching the six-year-old is that he won’t have the unmitigated audacity to throw in a sequel-baiting post-credit scene.

Now, if Welcome to Sudden Death was a family friendly version of those films, I’d say it has a niche for younger teen viewers, but it’s also “R” rated – although in this instance I’m assuming that stands for “Really, Really Bad”. Scenes of torture, bloody violence, and a pretty high swear-count make this unsuitable for younger audiences. Maybe this will find a place with other cult classics in the “so bad it’s funny” category, but unless you’re some kind of masochist, I wouldn’t recommend watching this under any circumstances.