Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson can’t be stopped. At this point people just assume the wrestler-turned-actor’s projects, like, say, this weekend’s Kevin Hart team-up Central Intelligence, will be big hits, but it wasn’t always that way. Johnson has come a long way since his movie career began in earnest with The Scorpion King, and it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. It took him over a decade and a lot of misses to become a major force at the box office.
It’s those box office flops that we’re going to look at. We’ve all seen Fast & Furious and G.I. Joe, but what about Walking Tall, Snitch, or Empire State? We’re going to go through all of Johnson’s disappointments to weigh in on which ones deserve a second look, and which deserve their rock-bottom reputation.
The Rundown (2003)
Budget: $85 million
Box Office: $80 million
The Rundown gave Johnson his first big role where he didn’t play a loincloth-wearing insect deity, and it still stands out as a fun action romp that did a nice job of showcasing Johnson as a charming lead. In the film, Johnson plays Beck, a “retrieval expert” that gets sent to a small Brazilian mining village to pick up a criminal’s son, played by Sean William Scott. The fact that this flick co-stars Stifler may not sound particularly promising, but he and Johnson have surprisingly easy chemistry, and they’re backed up by Rosario Dawson and Christopher Walken as, um, an evil miner/warlord or some sort?
See, Scott has found a golden idol that will somehow free the people, led by Dawson, from Walken’s oppression. The Rundown doesn’t make much sense, but Walken wears a giant Panama hat and spews a wacky monologue every time he’s on screen, and at one point Johnson has a badass fight scene with three guys wielding giant whips. That’s all you really need to know about this fun mash-up of classic Hollywood adventure tropes, and ’80s action movies.
Verdict: Electrifying
Walking Tall (2004)
Budget: $46 million
Box Office: $57 million
A remake of the 1973 Joe Don Baker classic of the same name, Walking Tall stars Johnson as Chris Vaughn, an ex-Special Forces sergeant, who returns to his Washington hometown, only to find it inundated with petty mobsters and crystal meth. Ironically, Joe Don Baker played an ex-pro wrestler in the original Walking Tall, but I suppose that would have been too on-the-nose.
Faced with the normal realities most small towns face these days, Johnson makes the totally reasonable decision to go and smash up the local casino with a two-by-four. This somehow gets Johnson elected sheriff, because corruption and small-town ignorance is cool when it benefits Johnson. The People’s Champion then deputizes Johnny Knoxville, shoots half the town, and eventually shuts down the casino, the only source of gainful employment in the area. Hooray? Aside from being kind of brainless, Walking Tall suffers from the same issue that afflicts so many Arnold Schwarzenegger projects – it’s just impossible to buy this beautifully-muscled Greek God as a regular Joe Sixpack. More like Joe Sixteenpack, amirite?
Verdict: Rock Bottom
Doom (2005)
Budget: $60 million
Box Office: $56 million
Apparently Doom cost $60 million to make, which is hard to believe considering the movie looks every bit as cheap and sloppy as your typical Uwe Boll video game hack job. Johnson plays part of a team of personality-deprived space marines, who spend most of Doom wandering around a murky space station getting killed by Martian mutants. Doom briefly comes alive during a first-person sequence that apes the original games, but the movie spends the rest of its time trying hard (and failing) to be Aliens, but can’t even reach Alien vs. Predator levels of mediocrity.
Verdict: Rock Bottom
Gridiron Gang (2006)
Budget: $30 million
Box Office: $40 million
Gridiron Gang let Johnson get in touch with his inspirational side after several movies spent beating up and killing everybody in sight. Our man plays Sean Porter, a worker at a youth detention center, who becomes discouraged by what happens to most kids after they’re released. What with the drugs and gangs and, uh, loitering and all. So, Johnson starts a football team, and I bet you can guess where the movie goes from there.
The team provides these wayward youths with the structure and inspiration they need. They fight a little, they cry a little, and in the end they earn their way to the championship game after a rousing speech from Johnson. Yes, Gridiron Gang is predictable and sappy as all hell, but it’s a well-meaning movie, and sticks fairly closely to real-life events, so it’s hard to dislike.
Verdict: Electrifying
Southland Tales (2006)
Budget: $17 million
Box Office: $375,000
Woof. The Rock’s first (and so far, only) appearance in what might be deemed serious cinema, happened to be in Richard Kelly’s infamous Donnie Darko follow-up Southland Tales. How to even sum up Southland Tales? It takes place in a dystopian 2008 following World War III, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the movie, as it’s filmed like an episode of The O.C. and packed with sexy folk like Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore and Justin Timberlake at their most pretty.
Johnson plays an amnesiac action star who becomes the most wanted man in the world after he writes a screenplay that prophesies the world’s doom. Is Southland Tales worth watching on a dare or out of morbid curiosity? Maybe, but I’ve never survived a full viewing.
Verdict: Rock Bottom
Faster (2010)
Budget: $25 million
Box Office: $35 million
No, this isn’t part of the Fast & Furious series, but I bet the movie’s producers hoped you’d make that mistake. Faster opens with HD close-ups of Johnson’s erect nips as he paces his jail cell to the strains of a blues song. Immediately upon his release, Johnson sprints all the way to town, finds his car waiting for him in the middle of a junkyard, then barges into an office and shoots a random dude in the head. We’re then introduced to Billy Bob Thorton’s floppy-haired, heroin-shooting, weeks-from-retirement detective and his partner Carla Gugino, who are assigned to arrest the maniac shooting people in the face. Of course Johnson is murdering people in broad daylight for revenge, but it would be a stretch to say what he’s doing is actually justified.
The first few minutes of Faster promises a batsh*t Jason Statham/Nic Cage-style actioner that the rest of the movie doesn’t really deliver. Unfortunately, the movie gets self-serious quickly, as everybody’s on drugs, miserable and welling with tears at a moment’s notice. Also, this is a movie where Billy Bob Thorton says “I have a hunch” and Carla Gugino replies, without shame, “So did Quasimodo, and look where it got him.” Yeesh. Seeing The Rock play a totally irredeemable character in such a bleak movie is kind of a novelty, but that novelty probably won’t keep your from falling asleep after an hour.
Verdict: Rock Bottom
Snitch (2013)
Budget: $35 million
Box Office: $57 million
Johnson takes on mandatory minimum drug sentencing! In Snitch, Johnson plays blue collar construction dude John Matthews, a man whose son is set up by a friend and busted for receiving a bag of ecstasy in the mail. The kid refuses to set up one of his friends in turn and is doomed to serve a full 10-year sentence. Johnson isn’t about to let this stand, so he infiltrates the drug dealers on his own, then promises the DA (played by a totally out-of-place Susan Sarandon) that he’ll provide the evidence to take them down in exchange for his son’s freedom. I’m pretty sure that’s not how the legal system works, but the movie assures us that it’s based on a true story, so just go with the flow.
Snitch operates on pretty shaky moral ground, as Johnson endangers a lot of good folks (and kills many more not-so-good folks) to get his dorky, privileged son out of trouble. But if you can put that out of your mind, Snitch is a solid, tense thriller. It certainly requires more actual acting of Johnson than any of his other movies, and he acquits himself well. If you want to see Johnson take on Michael K. Williams in a movie that dares to occasionally broach some real issues, Snitch is worth a look.
Verdict: Electrifying
Empire State (2013)
Budget: $11 million
DVD Sales: $4 million
Wait, what? A movie starring Johnson, Liam Hemsworh, and Emma Roberts went straight to video? In 2013? Man, Empire State must be terrible, right? Here’s the weird thing – it actually isn’t bad at all.
Based on the true story of the biggest cash robbery in U.S. history, Empire State stars Hemsworth as guy who gets a job with an armored truck service, only to discover the company’s security is comically lax. A harebrained caper is soon hatched, and Johnson plays the cop who has to unravel all the shenanigans. Empire State isn’t the most original movie, and it takes its ’80s setting a little far with a lot of off-putting racist and sexist dialogue, but it’s nicely shot, well-acted and genuinely tense in spots. So why’d Empire State get shunted to the DVD rack? Maybe it was that aforementioned racist/sexist dialogue, or maybe The Rock decided he no longer wants to be seen in anything that’s not a potential franchise-spawning blockbuster. I’m not sure. Honestly though, I’d much prefer a second viewing of Empire State over San Andreas or G.I. Joe: Retaliation.
Verdict: Electrifying
