The second Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson lumbered out of the wrestling ring and onto film units, Hollywood grew to become decided to make him the subsequent Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s straightforward to see the logic of that concept. With Arnold then leaving the trade for a brand new profession in politics, a void had opened within the action-hero enviornment. And just like the Austrian weightlifter who dominated the field workplace earlier than him, The Rock had an impossibly herculean physique — a physique made for blockbusters. Who higher to fill the Terminator’s profile than one other hulking he-man trying to transition from athletics to performing?
Proper from the beginning of his film profession, Johnson took a web page or two from the Schwarzenegger playbook. He made his big-screen debut as The Scorpion King, the villain of The Mummy Returns — a job that appeared to mix the inhuman menace of Arnold’s T-800 with the sword-and-sandal backstory of his Conan the Barbarian. The parallels continued with Johnson’s first starring function, the Mummy spinoff The Scorpion King, a prequel that pulled the T2 maneuver of turning the dangerous man into a very good man.
Nevertheless it was The Rundown, which turns 20 subsequent week, that felt like The Rock’s first true bid for a spot within the pantheon, the film that may place him because the inheritor obvious to the throne of Arnold. Schwarzenegger himself gave his blessing to this succession plan within the film, with a one-line, blink-and-you-miss-it cameo. The A-lister, whose then-final starring automobile Terminator 3 had opened simply two months prior, walks by The Rock within the opening scene. “Have enjoyable,” he says — an specific passing of the torch from one gladiator to a different.
The Rundown forged Johnson, then nonetheless credited as simply The Rock, as Beck, a bounty hunter accumulating unpaid money owed for L.A. mortgage shark Billy Walker (William Lucking). Keen to place this unsavory line of labor behind him and begin a brand new profession as a chef, Beck agrees to 1 final job with an enormous payout: retrieving Walker’s ne’er do properly, treasure-hunting son, Travis (Seann William Scott), from a mining city in Brazil. It looks like a easy sufficient job, however the city is dominated by a corrupt baron (a usually flamboyant Christopher Walken) who doesn’t take kindly to outsiders stumbling into his operation, a mass exploitation of the land and its individuals.
The style alchemy of the film is obvious. It’s mainly Midnight Run meets Romancing the Stone, minus the romance. (Seemly positioned, in her first scene, because the love curiosity, Rosario Dawson is rapidly revealed to be extra of an action-hero ally, a revolutionary plotting towards Walken’s villain.) The script could possibly be loads higher. Lots of the antagonistic banter between Beck and Travis falls flat — partly due to the dialogue, but additionally as a result of the latter is just not essentially the most sharply outlined doofus on Scott’s resume stuffed with them. He both wanted to be roughly of an obnoxious rich-kid caricature.
But what The Rundown lacks in verbal wit it usually makes up for in impressed bodily humor. The movie is directed by Peter Berg, coming off the bachelor-party-gone-wrong comedy Very Dangerous Issues. Although the jittery camerawork anticipates his later collaborations with Mark Wahlberg, it is a far more playful motion film. The truth is, it’s usually one thing of a live-action cartoon: Beck and Travis take a comically protracted tumble down an extended embankment, dodge screaming baboons whereas dangling the wrong way up in booby traps, and change slurred insults after ingesting psychotropic fruit. Even the precise struggle scenes — just like the one the place Beck disarms a room stuffed with goons whereas stopping a fleeing Travis by kicking an empty clip at him — have a giddy slapstick high quality.
The film is perhaps the purest distillation of Johnson’s attraction as an motion star, then nonetheless budding. Too usually nowadays, he tends to undertake a sort of salesman “appeal,” beaming and mugging like a billboard for himself. (Possibly it’s the aspiring politician in him — one other method he appears to nonetheless be following in Arnold’s large footsteps.) In The Rundown, The Rock isn’t so relentlessly on. A part of the enjoyable of Beck is that he’s each reasonably humorless and never some unstoppable badass. He’s a reluctant skilled, making an attempt to get by means of a job he doesn’t get pleasure from. The movie makes him one thing of a straight man; it’s a humorous alternative, on condition that he additionally has the scale and look of a comic-book illustration.
Berg isn’t afraid to make him look silly typically, too — to tug this ripped human specimen by means of the grime. Years earlier than information broke that Johnson had a “can’t lose a struggle” clause in his Quick & Livid contract, the actor willfully subjected himself to a litany of bodily abuse; throughout one brawl in The Rundown, he will get kicked into the air by an opponent after which kicked in a special course, midair, by one other. The movie appears to know that The Rock could be extra likable if he’s fallible; there’s plenty of pleasure available in seeing the strolling (and Strolling Tall) definition of a robust man take a licking and carry on ticking.
Passing endorsement by the legend apart, Beck isn’t actually a Schwarzenegger character. He’s not a killing machine, cold-blooded or glib. He fires few one-liners and — at the least till the climax — fewer bullets. Although it’s a on condition that he’ll ultimately be pressured to select up a gun (his insistence that nobody will like what occurs if he does solely whets the viewers’s urge for food for the inevitable), the film takes his aversion to firearms and killing midway severely. It provides the character an ethical dimension that few of Arnold’s males of motion possess. Beck is a big who’d desire to be mild, and that makes him a humorous, sympathetic motion hero — and doubtless essentially the most likable one Johnson has ever performed.
Is it his signature function? Extra individuals know him as Hobbs, the glowering lawman of the Quick & Livid films. However these movies are ensembles, and the spinoff that places him on the middle additionally forces him to share the highlight with fellow motion film star Jason Statham. In the meantime, what number of followers may even title the characters Johnson performs in San Andreas or Central Intelligence or Purple Discover or Rampage or Skyscraper? The Rock is a bankable star in an age with out too lots of these, however there’s a motive he hasn’t actually launched franchises; few of his films discover a good use for his superhuman stature or a protagonist distinguished by greater than it.
The Rundown isn’t any masterpiece. Now, as ever, it appears extra like a fitfully enjoyable diversion, a very good Saturday afternoon film. Nevertheless it earns Johnson these Schwarzenegger comparisons… partly as a result of he’s not imitating Schwarzenegger in it. For all of the box-office success The Rock has achieved since,e it’s nonetheless The Rundown that makes one of the best case for him as an motion star with extra to supply than the size of a Greek god. Sequel when?
The Rundown is at the moment streaming on Peacock and Tubi. For extra of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please go to his Authory web page.
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