I have been a fan of pro wrestling in its various forms for close to three decades. I have traveled across the country and spent thousands of dollars to attend multiple WrestleManias. I own dozens of T-shirts, toys and other random items. I spend far too many hours every week on the WWE Network (when I’m not glued to USA on Monday and Tuesday nights, obviously). Pro wrestling has dominated my life for as long as I can remember — yet, somehow, I have never seen a single WWE Studios movie.
You know WWE Studios, right? It was the launching pad for the movie careers of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Cena. It is also the arm of WWE that loses money most frequently. Nearly all of their movies are straight-to-DVD releases, and most feature a random WWE Superstar or two doing their best to earn their SAG cards.
And even though I live for all things WWE, I have never seen any of the WWE Studios’ (or its predecessor, WWE Films’) movies -— not the big ones like The Rundown or The Scorpion King, not the goofy ones like Knucklehead or Jingle All The Way 2, not even anything in The Marine franchise. However, all that is going to change with Pro Wrestling Movie Club, the latest addition to the With Spandex family of columns, where we look at the beauty and absurdity of pro wrestling from every possible angle.
Join me as I watch a random WWE Studios movie each week for however long it takes to get through their entire video library to see if these films are worthy of your time and money, or if you’d be better off watching a random episode of Tuesday Night Titans on WWE Network instead. This is Pro Wrestling Movie Club.
THIS WEEK: Inside Out (2011)
TAGLINE: “Sometimes your best friend is your worst enemy.”
WWE SUPERSTAR: Triple H
ALSO STARRING: Michael Rapaport, Parker Posey, Bruce Dern
SYNOPSIS: A man is released from prison after serving a long time for killing a man who tried to kill his best friend. Once out, he just wants to live a normal life, but his best friend immediately gets him into a new heap of serious troubles. (via IMDB)
WATCH IT: Netflix [currently unavailable] / Amazon / YouTube
Inside Out opens with Triple H’s character, AJ, getting shot literally 90 seconds into the movie. Twist! We then get a flashback to six days ago, where we meet Jack Small (played by Michael Rapaport), who is eagerly awaiting AJ’s release from prison, where he was locked up for 13 years following a manslaughter conviction. Jack gives an opening monologue to a dog, whom we never see again for the next 90 minutes. Sorry, dog, your scenes got left on the cutting-room floor.
Jack and AJ embrace after he emerges from the prison bus. AJ flashes a nasty-looking gash across his abdomen, saying it came from a prison riot three years prior. He asks Jack if he has any new scars. The response? “The only new ones I have are in here,” he says, tapping his heart. It’s worth noting that we are supposed to be in Louisiana, and neither Michael Rapaport nor Triple H make even the slightest attempt at an accent.
Jack and AJ arrive at Jack’s house where we meet Claire, played by Parker Posey. It turns out that Claire and AJ used to be an item, and once AJ went to prison, Jack swooped in. The couple also has a 13-year-old daughter named Pepper, which is pretty convenient timing given that AJ was in prison for 13 years. I wonder if Pepper is really AJ’s daughter. Foreshadowing!
Bruce Dern plays Jack’s dad, Vic, a veterinarian who runs some shady businesses on the side. His current scheme is buying untaxed cigarettes and flipping them to stores for twice the price — a small-time smuggling ring. Illegal, sure, but it’s not exactly The Sopranos. Vic sends Jack to a bar to collect a large sum of money from someone who owes him, and this is where things get sticky.
At the bar, Jack shoots the dude who owes his dad money by accident following a coughing fit after taking too big of a swig off a bottle of liquor. Who can’t relate to that? Just when AJ thought he was out, they pull him back in.
All of a sudden we’re in a Louisiana Tax Board meeting, led by an agent named Martha (played by Julie White), who is discussing terrorism —- Osama Bin Laden, Hezbollah, the whole thing — and how Vic’s cigarette smuggling operation is actually sending money overseas to fund the big baddies in the Middle East. It turns out the guy who was just murdered, Sylvester, was actually an informant and was using taxpayer dollars to pay off his debt to Vic with the assumption that said dollars — all $250,000 of them — will be used by Vic to buy more cigarettes. The plot thickens, I guess.
Jack and AJ dispose of the body by chucking it into the back of the guy’s car then taking it to an impound lot to be crushed, but not before Jack takes all of the money out of the guy’s briefcase.
Now, we get to the good stuff: Triple H teaches his maybe-daughter how to pickle things. My wife, who has won multiple awards at county fairs for her canned and pickled goods in recent years, watched this scene with me. She said it was “pretty accurate,” though she prefers to use canning salt instead of sea salt, which is shown on the kitchen counter in the film. Get it together, Hollywood.
Shortly thereafter, Jack’s paranoia already begins to rear its ugly head, as he half-jokingly accuses AJ of sleeping with Claire (the only character in this movie who even attempts a passable Louisiana accent, by the way). He then drives off to parts unknown, with nearly a quarter-million dollars in tow, running over a cop in the process. That’s one way to avoid detection!
At this point, the movie blazes through about a billion plot points in 15 minutes. First, we get Martha going to the local police station to try and find a detective to help her with her case. Who does she get but Detective Calgrove played Michael fucking Cudlitz, who was goddamn phenomenal as a cop on TV’s Southland and who pretty much plays the same character here. Then, we jump to the bar where Sylvester was murdered earlier, and Vic’s mute henchwoman shows up and beats the tar out of the owner, which then brings out the best part of the movie: OLD LADY WITH A SHOTGUN!
She springs into action, scaring the henchwoman off, but it’s too little, too late: The bar is wired to blow up, and Vic and his henchwoman detonate it as they drive away. Goodbye, old lady with a shotgun. :(
Martha and Calgrove pull in AJ and effectively tell him his shit is fucked unless he brings Jack in, because they know he killed Sylvester and stole the money. The next thing I know, AJ is visiting Vic in prison. Apparently, someone ratted out Vic regarding the cigarette smuggling, landing the old man in jail. Unless I blacked out for a minute, we never actually see this, just the aftermath of Vic in an orange jumpsuit (but that happens before we actually find out why).
AJ drives off in his Clark Griswold station wagon and ends up being tailed by some crooks. I honestly do not know who these crooks are or for whom they are working. (I swear I am watching this movie.) AJ then takes them out by parking his car, walking to a dumpster, taking a piece of cardboard, wrapping it around his fist and then punching one of the guys through the car window. Sure, that will work!
AJ meets up with Jack out at the family cabin to tell him he’s made a deal with the cops on his behalf: If Jack flips on his dad, he will only get 15 years for murdering someone, and apparently will be out in 13 (because Triple H said so, I suppose?). Jack refuses this offer, then asks AJ, “What about you?” to which he responds, “I open up a place, make pickles, take it as it comes.” Then Jack immediately walks offscreen and shoots himself. That’s one way to wrap up a storyline.
We cut to Vic getting out of jail only to get immediately re-arrested by Cudlitz and Martha on murder charges. We then cut to AJ visiting his mom, who is dying. We then cut to Martha visiting her dad, who is also dying. These characters aren’t so different after all! Movie making is a skill, y’all.
In the next scene, we discover that it was Claire who called in the tip on Vic, adding another level of intrigue. She then drops the bombshell that Pepper is AJ’s daughter, not Jack’s. This causes the two to kiss for the first time in more than a dozen years — although the requisite lovemaking scene gets skipped, due to this just being a PG-13 movie. (Had this been made in the Attitude Era, we would’ve seen X-Pac pop out of the closet mid-coitus or something.) But we do get the aftermath, of the two of them lying in bed together, and Pepper walking in on them. Family drama! Conveniently, Pepper waits outside the door until the following all happens:
- Claire wakes up and rummages through the pockets of AJ’s clothing, finding a class ring that belonged to Jack
- Claire then gets dressed and sits in a chair in the corner
- AJ wakes up, only to find Claire staring him down, accusing him of letting Jack be murdered (not knowing that he took his own life)
- Claire pulls a gun
At this point, the door opens and a shot is fired — and we are now back to the opening scene of the movie. But which woman shot him, his high school sweetheart or his recently estranged daughter? Only time will tell!
However, not even a bullet can keep Triple H down, as he puts a bathrobe on and goes to the front door as Martha and Calgrove try to come in. He does not let them in. The pair gives up and literally does not appear for the rest of the film. AJ then showers and bandages himself up — presumably with a bullet still lodged in his abdomen — and retrieves yet another gun from Jack’s house, only to see a cop car waiting for him when he tries to leave. He then outsmarts the cops by calling in a fake shooting somewhere nearby, causing the car to flee. They don’t call him the Cerebral Assassin for nothing!
Trips then drives his station wagon back to the cabin, where Claire and Pepper are already waiting for him(?). Claire seems pretty chipper for being in the same place where her husband just blew his brains out a few hours prior, but she says that “Jack left a letter explaining everything,” so that probably did a lot of smoothing over. Claire then says that Pepper was in the hallway and “heard everything,” which allows us to assume that it was she who shot AJ. So the sequence of events is this: Claire sleeps with AJ, Claire shoots AJ, Claire runs away from AJ and locates the dead body of her husband in the process, AJ shows up, Claire is suddenly cool with AJ again. Yup, everything checks out.
But before the family can get too comfortable, AJ discovers that the cabin has been rigged to explode by Vic’s henchwoman. They escape with seconds to spare, and AJ sends Claire and Pepper away while he prepares to face off in an intergender match for the ages. But before we get any serious combat, Pepper shoots and kills the henchwoman. The family that murders together stays together, I guess.
Flash forward two weeks. We catch up with the remaining Small family members at Jack’s grave. His wife and daughter say goodbye, then climb back into the station where a waiting AJ says, “A pickle would be good right about now.” Pepper then reaches into the back and pulls out a jar only to find $250,000 stuffed inside of it. AJ grins and Pepper laughs, as she realizes she never truly cared about the man who dutifully raised her for 13 years and would rather die than be locked away from her. This movie got really fucking dark in the last 30 seconds. But, hey: $250,000 can buy a shitload of pickles.
So! We’ve reached the end. In Pro Wrestling Movie Club, we have three specific questions that must be asked at the conclusion of each film:
1. IS THE MOVIE OBJECTIVELY ANY GOOD? No. There are loose ends galore, with characters receiving little-to-no backstory and plotlines vanishing in the wind.
2. IS THE WWE SUPERSTAR ANY GOOD IN IT? Definitely not. Triple H sounds no different than his 20-minute segments on Raw each week, and he does nothing to bring his character to life. Dude doesn’t even eat a pickle in the entire film, and that is literally the only thing we know he cares about.
3. WOULD I BE EMBARRASSED TO HAVE A FRIEND FIND A COPY IN MY BLU-RAY COLLECTION? Absolutely. Listen, I’m sure I own plenty of questionable movies, but this thing is beyond the pale.
NEXT WEEK: I watch 2009’s 12 Rounds, starring a comparatively babyfaced John Cena. Is the title a boxing reference or a firearms reference? I can’t wait to find out!
