BEFORE: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson carries over from "Central Intelligence". We're going back down to South America tonight, it feels like I was just down here for "Triple Frontier", and "The Lost City of Z" before that. But so it goes...
THE PLOT: A tough aspiring chef is hired to bring home a mobster's son from the Amazon but gets involved in the fight against an oppressive town operator and the search for a legendary treasure.
AFTER: I'm two films in to my Dwayne Johnson chain, and already I've spotted the pattern - for comic effect, you pair up "The Rock" with somebody who's smaller than average-size, and suddenly he looks bigger than a building. Kevin Hart, Seann William Scott, it doesn't matter, just nobody close to him in size - though I suppose if you paired him up with Peter Dinklage, that would be too obvious. Hey, it worked for Schwarzenegger when he was trying to become a household name, they paired him up with either Danny DeVito or a room full of kindergarten students, it's the same trick.
This film is kind of like "Indiana Jones" got together with "Midnight Run" and had a baby, and raised that baby on movies like "Rambo" and "The Magnificent Seven". Those are all good things (except I've never seen a "Rambo" movie...) so why does it feel like a year from now, I'm not going to remember a thing about this movie? It's like food with calories but no nutritional value, or something - sure, it fills you up and makes you briefly happy, but after the sugar rush wears off, you're going to crash AND be hungry again.
This was released back in 2003, and I'm not sure, but this could have been the start of that trend in movies where a character can "read the room" and fight back against a much stronger force of opponents just by using the environment around him to its best advantage. This popped up in "Batman v. Superman", "The Equalizer", and "Kingsman: The Secret Service", which are all relatively recent (OK, maybe a few cycles ago, because those films have all had sequels already) so I'd really like to know where this came from - what film was FIRST to feature this? Maybe it was "The Rundown", and maybe I'd be able to find out for sure, if only I knew what this ability was called.
It's important that Beck has this ability in this film, because he doesn't believe in guns. I mean, he believes they exist, but he doesn't like using them. Whether he thinks that only bad people use guns, or the screenwriters didn't want to make things very easy for him, I can't really say. But it's at least interesting that he always has to find another way of doing things besides shooting a gun, and it's too bad that they couldn't sustain this for the entire film. It's also, not-so-coincidentally a great way to turn every fight from a gun-fight into a wrestling match - and this was one of The Rock's first films after coming out of wrestling, except for those two films in "The Mummy" franchise.
It's good for a few laughs, but somehow it wasn't enough to keep me from falling asleep in the middle last night, and I had to watch the whole second half this morning before leaving for work. I guess I'm really burned out on movies, and something has to be really super-engrossing right now to keep my interest and keep me awake. Something tells me I need a break - and two days off for Comic-Con just isn't going to do it. Thankfully I'm going to take another week in October for a vacation, and then I'll have almost the whole month of November to catch up on some other things.
NITPICK POINT: The film takes great care to tell us the names and (fake) bios of all the big football players that are around Knappmiller in the club, but then after they're all dispatched by Beck, they never pop up again, so all that valuable information is useless. So why was it all displayed on-screen as if it's so damn important? Who cares about the goofy nicknames of fictional sports stars? (Ah, according to the IMDB, the footage is all from Vince McMahon's short-lived XFL franchise, and Vince was a producer of this film. Still, no excuse.)
NITPICK POINT #2: Do I buy Dwayne Johnson as a chef? Well, maybe I would if they ever showed him cooking anything, but all we ever see is him making a note about looking into porcini mushrooms. That's not a chef, a chef would already know what those are. I could buy him as a potential restaurant OWNER, someone who maybe started out as a bouncer and was looking to upgrade, but as a marketable chef, not so much. EDIT: Was this a veiled reference to the old wrestling tagline "Can you SMELLLLLLL what The Rock is cooking?" If so, I finally got it, like one day later.
Also starring Seann William Scott (last seen in "Movie 43"), Rosario Dawson (last heard in "Sorry to Bother You"), Christopher Walken (last seen in "Envy", Ewen Bremner (last seen in "T2 Trainspotting"), Jon Gries (last seen in "The Grifters"), William Lucking (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Ernie Reyes Jr., Stuart F. Wilson, Dennis Keiffer (last seen in "The Happytime Murders"), Garrett Warren, Antonio Munoz, Stephen Bishop, with cameos from Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "Life Itself") and the voice of Emeril Lagasse.
RATING: 5 out of 10 howler monkeys (or were they African baboons?)
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