Rundown
Dwayne Johnson thankfully has long since gotten out from under the thumb of one Vince McMahon, but back when McMahon and his wrestling empire were trying to launch his movie career for the profit and benefit of his own WWE Films, ol Vince proved that just like with his wrestling product, he sure has a LOT of trouble picking out a good script with a decent story. Thus, this release from 2003, which makes some admittedly smart casting choices but nonetheless plays like something that was written by a spastic ten year old who has not watched enough (good) action movies (and too much wrestling). Johnson plays a collection man for a loan shark here, and the opening scene of him strolling into a nightclub to get a payment from a top college QB before finally beating it out of him (and his offensive line) shows promise, with Johnson showing real potential (and a word of encouragement from a cameoing action legend), but unfortunately when his boss gives him âone last jobâ to retrieve the manâs son from the jungles of Brazil and bring him home, the story turns into a combo ripoff of Romancing The Stone and Midnight Run, with a dash of Commando for flavor, only anything new brought to the table is about as thin as a communion wafer. Indeed, the PG-13 rating this flick obviously strived for gives it a watered-down flavor that keeps it from cutting loose and being a truly badass endeavor, instead becoming something not akin to a Saturday morning action cartoon for brain-damaged tykes. As the son who continually insists that he has found some sort of treasure and wants to track it down before going back, Seann William Scott does another variation of his American Pie Stifler character (which he no doubt will be doing for the rest of his career), never winning the audience over even as Johnson has to tolerate sharing screen time with him; As the villain of the piece, director Peter Berg has (smartly) cast Christopher Walken in the role of the American scavenger who has enslaved a whole town into digging for gold for him, but the Legend canât really do much with what heâs given, save for a funny bit where he talks to his men about the Tooth Fairy; As the barmaid of the town who turns out to be a rebel leader, Rosario Dawson is certainly easy on the eyes, but the bit late in the film where she drugs both Johnson and Scott so she can make off with the treasure (so that she now has no one to protect her from Walken) while still promising them that they will get their cut makes no sense whatsoever storywise, other than to set up a gag at the end; Ewan Bremner as the crazed Scottish airplane pilot who helps out is an annoying clichĂ© especially since the viewer can barely understand what heâs saying, and having him come out to face Walkenâs men in the climax (complete with bagpipe and kilt) is painfully dumb; Jon Gries (best known as Laszlo from Real Genius) brings nothing to the table as Walkenâs manic henchman; and Ernie Reyes Jr. comes in as a ârebel leaderâ mostly so he can have a grossly unrealistic fight with Johnson. Which brings up another very bad problem with todayâs action movies, when CGI is used to show its stars engaging in acts that would cripple even the strongest of men in real life, as a lame attempt to bring a âlarger than lifeâ quality to the proceedings, when the old genre icons like Arnie, Bruce, and Sly would at least have their charactersâ actions show just a bit of plausibility. Through it all, director Berg at least shows some creativity, and little things like Walken pressing the send button on his radio so that Johnson can hear him laughing at him bring some life to things, but the script still builds to a ludicrous conclusion with Johnson utilizing a herd of cattle to stampede Walkenâs men, and then these same bad guys seeming to have the worst aim in the history of western civilization to the badly drawn out and staged death scene of Walken himself, all leading up to the âhappyâ ending, where it would seem our heroes will soon have every hitman in LA gunning for them within hours, shows that GOOD scriptwriting is definitely becoming a lost art. Overall, despite Johnsonâs potential and other good actors involved with a creative director, living proof that even in mindless action movies, itâs still all about the writingâŠ
5/10