“The Rundown” is a tailor-made star vehicle for The Rock, a.k.a. Dwayne Johnson, and there’s always a certain charm in a new pretender trying on the creaky suit of armor worn by so many other crossover colossuses: ex-wrestlers, ex-bodybuilders, ex-football players, and so on.  Even though nearly every fight scene uses more wires than Western Union, The Rock has some nifty moves, an appropriately cartoonish set of facial expressions, and the usual swagger that all leading action men require. He even gets an endorsement from a certain high-profile, orgy-loving politician; the torch, we can safely say, has been passed. 

As with all movies of this kind, the question the movie poses is not “Is this a good story?” but “Does this movie have enough commercial viability to warrant a sequel?”  The answer is yes. And that’s too bad, because Johnson, perhaps more than The Rock, seems too intelligent for the role.  For one thing, he hasn’t got the trademark speech impediment that has so touched the hearts of cineastes who’ve thrilled to the exploits of Stallone, Van Damme, Schwarzenegger, et al.  Johnson actually appears to have a reasonably tight command of English, and occasionally serves it up with a little verve.  He may never escape the confinement of genre acting, but within that little sphere he is too smart for the material he’s given.

For example, there are a number of drab one-liners (“Get—in—the truck!”, “You should’ve taken Option A...”, “I’m going to kill you”) which are obviously the traditional action hero’s tongue-in-cheek quips.  More often than not they fail. Johnson doesn’t sell them. At times it seems that he’s an articulate man doing a parody of a dumber man’s muscle-bound rage.  He seems more comfortable when he’s touting Muhammad Ali’s brains over Mike Tyson’s brawn, or, in the movie’s best joke, revealing a decent grasp of irony and comic timing (“You’re gonna make me do this now? The whole offensive line is in there...they have a real shot at repeating this year. I don’t want anyone to get hurt”).  Amazing as it sounds, “The Rundown” is beneath his talents and intelligence.

Then again, maybe he’s saving a few surprises for those future gubernatorial debates. The Brian Bosworths of the world should take note: the difference between a $20 million opening weekend and straight to video is the recruitment of a great actor willing to slum it for a few bucks.  In an interview with The Rock on the day of the film’s release, Conan O’Brien remarked that Christopher Walken had such distinction as an actor that he could read the back of a cereal box and it would get laughs (I think he was complimenting Walken, but I’m not certain). Walken elevates the film with doses of shrewd self-parody that come from that kind of comic dictation. The “tooth fairy” speech is an enormously funny riff on some of Tarantino’s overwritten monologues in “True Romance” and “Pulp Fiction”, while his final death-walk has a bit of fun with “King of New York”.  It is Walken’s sure-handed (and scene-stealing) professionalism, and not the beefcake burlesque of The Rock—who often seems as earnest as a seventh-grader in a school production of “Our Town”—that provides the twinkle in the movie’s eye.