BEFORE: When I was a kid, my parents had completely different attitudes toward movies, and both were different from the one I enjoy today - my father mostly refused to go to movie theaters, which raises a few questions for me. I can't recall if it was because he thought the prices were high (only they weren't back then) or because he believed that every movie would eventually air on TV. He was sort of right about this, but also very wrong - because he refused to pay for cable TV, so he was talking about just NETWORK TV and there were only three channels back then, plus PBS plus two local Boston stations. To be fair, a lot of movies did air on TV, even those local channels aired third-run classics, there was Channel 38's "The Movie Loft" and Channel 56's "Creature Feature", so we did get to see a LOT of movies, but for sure not every movie aired on TV, so I think he missed a lot, but he didn't seem to care.
My mother wanted to see every Disney film and every classic movie musical made since 1940, so when VHS came around, she joined that Columbia House club and assembled a collection of Rodgers & Hammerstein films on VHS, plus "My Fair Lady" and "West Side Story" and such. She also would occasionally go out to the movies, to keep up on "Star Wars" and watch all the "Lord of the Rings" movies when they came out - also I think they'd go see religious movies about Jesus or saints and stuff, but there weren't a lot of those. Certainly neither parent anticipated having a son who would organize almost his whole life around watching movies and helping other people make them.
I don't know why I remember this, but when the original 1973 film "Walking Tall" aired on those local stations, she refused to watch it, or let anybody in the house watch it. Not because of violent content or the subject matter, but just because the main character was named Buford Pusser, she thought that sounded like a disgusting name, like not a curse word but maybe too close to one, so watching that film was never going to be in the cards. Which is a bit weird because it was based on a true story, that really was the man's name. Still, I've never seen that film, never got around to it in all this time.
Dwayne Johnson carries over from "Empire State", and yep, I'm headed straight for "Jungle Cruise", so pray for me.
THE PLOT: A former U.S. soldier returns to his hometown to find it overrun by crime and corruption, which prompts him to clean house.
AFTER: So maybe it's notable that this is based on the 1973 film, but they changed the main character's name to Chris Vaughn. Oddly, the real Buford Pusser was a professional wrestler, much like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson - maybe he was a bit less successful, though. In the original film he returns to Tennessee and tries to take down a crooked gambling and prostitution establishment, and ends up getting cut up badly by the goons there. This remake kept all that intact, but in addition to changing the lead's name they moved the story from Tennessee to Washington state.
Knowing that they kept most of the rest of the story intact actually saves me a bunch of time, now I don't need to go back and watch the original, I can just watch this 2004 version with The Rock in it. And as a bonus, there's Johnny Knoxville as the goofy, annoyingly messed-up sidekick-turned-deputy, a role he would essentially repeat a decade later when co-starring with Arnold Schwarzenegger in "The Last Stand". The idea's the same, there's a small town, representing America I suppose, that needs to be cleansed of its immoral elements, whether that's a drug lord or a casino or hookers and their pimps. I'm trying to ignore the underlying subtext in both cases, the fact that it takes good guys with guns to run worse guys with guns out of town - doesn't that get confusing when everybody has guns? How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys in those cases?
Here it's also very simple - the town mill was GOOD, casino is BAD. OK, so the casino is run by shady people with loaded dice, but there are some casinos out there that just stack the odds against the players, but they win honestly, right? And then just for good measure, the casino is also run by the same people bringing drugs and hookers to town, which seems like it would be bad for business if they didn't have all the local lawmen working for them, creating a "no-fly" legal zone around the casino, because of all that they've done for the community. Yeah, a crooked casino probably doesn't give that much back to the community, except for the bribes to the cops - but that seems to be enough to keep the sheriff from prosecuting anybody for carving up The Rock. Sorry, Chris Vaughn.
So, Vaughn does an end run around the inactive police, after he's acquitted for busting up the casino, he runs for sheriff and fires all the corrupt deputies, becoming an army of one, or rather two once he recruits his weirdo deputy with an intimate knowledge of how to take out a drug-dealing operation. For starters, you've got to arrest a low-level casino guard/drug dealer, and threaten the one thing that means anything to him, namely his tricked-out truck. That's dirty pool out in the country.
The casino bosses and the fired deputies seek revenge by blowing up the new sheriff's truck, then hitting the police station with a few thousand bullets. Oh, yeah, they try to take his family out too, but really, you don't mess with a man's truck. And you don't turn a workplace that's a symbol of the community's artisan spirit into a meth lab. Really, if you run a casino, you should be able to make enough money with it, unless of course your name is Trump. The big mistake the casino boss made here was getting overly greedy and getting into drugs and hookers, but honestly, I don't understand why this Washington town couldn't support both a casino AND a sawmill - who says the two have to be mutually exclusive?
Also starring Johnny Knoxville (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Neal McDonough (last seen in "1922"), Michael Bowen (last seen in "Django Unchained"), Ashley Scott (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), John Beasley (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Barbara Tarbuck, Kristen Wilson, Khleo Thomas (last seen in "Holes"), Kevin Durand (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Andrew Tarbet, Patrick Gallagher, John Stewart, Eric Breker, Ryan Robbins, Michael Adamthwaite (last seen in "Catch and Release"), Terence Kelly (ditto), Darcy Laurie, Fred Keating, Ben Cardinal, Birkett Turton, Tom Scholte (last seen in "The Core"), Mark Houghton (last seen in "Snakes on a Plane"), James Ashcroft, Eric Keenleyside (last seen in "Overboard" (2018)), Ty Olsson (last seen in "Chaos Theory"), with a cameo from Cobie Smulders (last seen in "Killing Gunther").
RATING: 5 out of 10 broken slot machines
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