Flak Magazine: Review of The Rundown, 09-26-03

Roger Ebert has said that The Rock is the heir to Arnold Schwarzenegger's throne as King of the Action Stars, and so when, in a surprise cameo, Arnold brushes by The Rock during the first minutes of The Rundown, it's surely meant as a passing of the torch.

But to consider The Rock to be the next model of Schwarzenegger's musclebound cyborg misreads what the wrestler-cum-actor is really about. The invincibility of Arnold's Cold War-era killing machines in Predator, Commando, Conan the Barbarian and Red Heat no longer jibes with America's worldview. Especially since Sept. 11, 2001, bloodsoaked and bullet-riddled action movies seem more like pornography than heroism. Even revenge fantasies don't feel right; Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage didn't satisfy the public's anger, even when Arnold shoved a cobra down a terrorist's throat.

The post-ironic action hero has to be vulnerable but stoic, amoral but human, bad-ass but funny — in other words, the anti-Terminator (or rather, the anti-Terminator Terminator; Arnold's roles in T2 and T3 showed him getting the joke). Enter The Rock, filling the void left by two aging action stars: not just Schwarzenegger, but also Jackie Chan. Chan is more Buster Keaton than Bruce Lee, but The Rock's physicality combines Schwarzenegger's power with Chan's gymnastics; his persona is equal parts Chan likability and Arnold toughness.

It isn't surprising that professional wrestling has spawned this new action star: The World Wresting Federation (now WWE, for "Entertainment") embraced irony seven years before Sept. 11, 2001, when it became clear that Reagan-era icon Hulk Hogan (remember the prayers, the training, the vitamins?) was no longer going to work as a main attraction. Without an Iron Sheik to slam or a turncoat like Saddam-supporter Sergeant Slaughter to set straight, audiences no longer responded to the Hulk's warrior piety as they had a decade ago. And so in the late '90s, WWF ringmaster Vince McMahon created two bankable new-era stars to reignite Hogan-like fervor: a vigilante anti-corporate antihero (Stone Cold Steve Austin) and a smartass superego whose mouth is his most powerful weapon. The Rock has spent the last six years cultivating this persona, generating immediate feedback in front of live audiences, making us laugh while kicking ass twice a week, 52 weeks a year. It's the perfect training regimen for a man poised to fill Chan's shoes and Arnold's tank tops.

The standard cry against professional wrestling is that it's "fake," by which its detractors mean "scripted." Ever since Vince McMahon adopted the descriptor "Sports Entertainment" (mostly for tax purposes) for his product, howver, rasslin' has made little fuss over the "fake" argument — by that logic, all pieces of fiction are "fake." Wrestling ebbs and flows not on its scripts — which change little, except for adapting to the current political and social climate — but on how well its performers bring these scripts to life. McMahon struck gold with his anti-corporate plots, but without the force of Stone Cold and The Rock's personalities, these scripts would have just petered into wrestling irrelevance. Wrestling is scripted, for sure, but the drama is very real — anyone who has attended a Wrestlemania (like this reviewer) can attest to that. This is little different from standard genre movies, whose plots change little as the characters tweak to the times. The Rock, by the force of his stage presence and creativity with the live microphone, has demonstrated that he can create the drama and humor that we require from the best action movies. Success in genre movies is in their style, their personality — the attention to details that makes James Cameron-directed action movies great and Steven Seagal movies suck. The Rock has proved in wrestling that he is a creative force, the sort of physical and personal presence that movie audiences bond with for the same reasons we love Arnold but dismiss Seagal.

While, by professional standards, The Rock is only an average wrestler, his athleticism translates smoothly to the screen. Not to make of habit of agreeing with Richard Roeper, but these are the finest choreographed fight scenes this side of Chan. The Rock can take a hit as well as he delivers it, which gives him a vulnerability that Schwarzenegger and post-Rocky Stallone never had. The Rundown's director, Peter Berg, must have observed from wrestling that the true measure of a performer is in how he sells for others, which results in a hilarious scene of The Rock getting beaten up by what one character refers to as "Oompa Loompas." Or consider the opening sequence, which features The Rock destroying the NCAA Division I All-American football team at a nightclub; we witness the action via strobe light, creating an exhilerating effect, even moving a sneak-preview crowd to scream "Rock Bottom!" when The Rock applied his finishing maneuver to a fullback. Then The Rock struts offscreen, as if he's trying to fend off embarrassment by force of personality. This persona is an ironic twist of hyperbole and frightening force, creating its own internal logic that both The Rock and the audience completely embrace … or, at least, the audience that goes to see The Rock in a movie completely embraces.

The Rock plays Beck, a bounty hunter commissioned by a mobster (introduced to us grinding meat in his kitchen) to fetch his son Travis, a renegade archeologist looking for priceless treasures in the Amazon. The Rock flies to Brazil, where he discovers Travis (Seann William Scott, aka Stifler) hitting on native bartender Mariana (Rosario Dawson). The Rock tries to grab his guy and go, but is stopped by Hatcher (Christopher Walken), a thug using the indigenous people to mine gold. The plot gets a little complicated from here; nevertheless, it's noteworthy that not only is The Rundown tailor-made for the broad shoulders of The Rock, but for its other leads as well. The brilliance of R.J. Stewart's script is that it gives Scott and Walken material that plays to their strengths, while providing enough room for inventiveness. Scott's routine is more restrained than, say, Chris Tucker's; he's turned dumbfoundedness into an art. His banter with The Rock is easy — they don't step into each other's spotlights, and neither seems determined to push the other out of the screen, as Tucker always seems to want to do with Chan in the Rush Hour movies. The Rock and Scott realize that the key to the movie is their relationship, both parts playing off each other. As for Walken, well, he works best when he's the only one who understands what he's talking about. The screenplay provides Walken with three grand speeches; the best — by which I mean most insane — is when Walken tries to explain to Brazilian jungle people who the tooth fairy is. The intrigue of Walken's nutsoid monologues is that he's baffled about why we're baffled, as if he's speaking as plain as day; here, he's squinty and befuddled, accenting all the wrong syllables.

As dirctor, Berg has a good feel for what his actors can do, giving us all this overblown action and camera mugging while still making it feel like an egoless affair. While he mishandles about 20 minutes of exposition leading up to the big finale, he compensates with many small but knowing touches. For those familiar with The Rock's wrestling career, there are big laughs when he summons a stampede of Brahma bulls to attack Walken, or when The Rock emerges heroically and hilariously from a wave of fire. Berg also showcases his creative eye — during a shoot-'em-up, playing cards and poker chips flutter to the ground like glitter, and when when The Rock eats poison fruit, Berg's distorted camera shots are terrific. He even gets an epic feel by focusing on the characters and then sending the camera far overhead to give a sense of the enormity of the journey, a common trick of Peter Jackson's from the Lord of the Rings movies. Yet Berg's finest touch involves The Rock fighting monkeys — during this primatial spar, Berg cuts to a chorus of monkeys watching the fight, clapping and carrying on like, well, the human audience.

Berg knows his monkeys well; he's basically given us a 90-minute People's Elbow. For the uninitiated, The People's Elbow is the completely ridiculous secondary finisher The Rock created to hyperbolize his already outlandish ring act (Mick Foley once called it "an abortion of wrestling"). The Rock will body slam his opponent, take off his elbow pad and fling it into the crowd, and while his opponent is lying there, he runs to the ropes, bounces off them, runs and jumps over his opponent (still lying there), bounces off the opposite ropes, runs up to the prone body, comes to a complete halt, looks around at the crowd, and then drops down and smashes his elbow into his opponent's nose. Then The Rock pins him. And the crowd roars with delight during the whole thing. Somehow, The Rock manages this sublimely ridiculous wink while going about the very serious business of defending his WWE World Title, and this is Jackie Chan's secret: It's not the ass that gets kicked, but how you create drama and humor in the ass-kicking itself. The Rock is no Chan or Keaton, no Schwarzenegger or Stallone, but he is a fascinating amalgam honed in the squared circle of audience appreciation. And The Rundown leaves little doubt that he's the future of the action movie.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)