The Rock holds steady in smackdown mayhem

PETER HOWELL
MOVIE CRITIC-Toronto Star
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The Rundown

Starring The Rock, Seann William Scott, Christopher Walken, Rosario Dawson and Ewen Bremner. Directed by Peter Berg. At major theatres. PG

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The human mountain known as The Rock, professional wrestler turned actor, enters a crowded disco with the intention of separating a man from his jewels.

The Rock is passed in the entrance by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, who smiles and says, “Have fun.”

This cameo moment is at the start of The Rundown, a movie desperately in need of more fun, and as torch passings go, Ah-nold’s nod of approval is pretty cool. Two decades ago, it was Schwarzenegger who was trying to prove himself as an actor, after first establishing himself as a strongman, and he recognizes that The Rock is now exactly where he was.

The timing couldn’t be better, either, what with Schwarzenegger running for high political office and Sly Stallone busy making Spy Kids sequels and counting his Rocky residuals. The world, or Hollywood at any rate, needs a new killing machine with a heart of gold.

The good news about The Rundown is that it establishes The Rock as a viable contender for Schwarzenegger’s crown. The Rock is a better actor than previously witnessed in The Mummy and The Scorpion King, where he played a comically antique thug.

The Rundown gives him a character, a bounty hunter named Beck, who has more than two dimensions: He not only knows how to break people in half with his baby finger, he can also rustle up a mean mushroom risotto.

He’s a chef, see, who aspires to own his own restaurant, which is why he needs that bounty money, and you can just stop that snickering right now. It’s not The Rock’s fault that the script by R.J. Stewart (Xena: Warrior Princess) and James Vanderbilt (Darkness Falls) too often brings guffaws at all the wrong moments, when it’s not being simply too stupid for words. (Sample dialogue: “Shut up.” “No, you shut up.”)

Nor is he to blame for director Peter Berg’s failure to demonstrate more of the demonic humour he summoned up for Very Bad Things, his debut movie that is now starting to look like his creative peak.

The Rundown’s biggest problem is that it peaks too soon. After thrilling us with the opening sequence, in which The Rock manhandles a Super Bowl’s worth of obnoxious football players, it settles into a predictable rumble-in-the-jungle chase where everything that can explode does, and where the occasional flashes of creativity come across as more weird than amusing, not least of which being the bizarre food references. Was there no catering crew on hand to feed the hungry cast and crew?

Bounty hunting chef Beck is ordered by his ganglord restaurateur boss Walker (William Lucking) to travel deep into the Brazilian jungle to find Walker’s reckless son Travis (Sean William Scott, ever the American Pie idiot). Beck doesn’t want to go ? he wants to exchange his brass knuckles for a chef’s cap ? but Walker makes him an offer he can’t refuse: get the kid, and you’ll get $250,000 and your own restaurant. The valet parking he’ll throw in for free.

Needless to say, Travis doesn’t want to be found. And students of Brazilian jungle chase pictures will hardly be surprised to learn that Beck discovers amongst the foliage a veritable Who’s Who of genre clich?s: There’s the insane mercenary capitalist (Christopher Walken, evidently on peyote), the beautiful and highly principled rebel leader (Rosario Dawson) and the wacky bush pilot (Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner.)

It’s saying something when the most believable character in a movie is a bounty hunting chef, but that’s only if you ignore the fact that most of the stunts look distinctly fake, like a Road Runner cartoon where everybody gets to play at being Wile E. Coyote. You can throw these people off cliffs, into flaming infernos, into volleys of machine gun fire, and nothing ever happens. You can subject them to gang rape by a gang of libidinous monkeys (I kid you not) and they emerge with their virtue still intact.

You can even force them to listen to an insanely risible speech by Walken about why he still believes in the Tooth Fairy, and nobody falls over dead from the exertion of stifling snorts of unintended laughter.

If The Rock can endure all this and still remain standing, then Schwarzenegger’s thorny crown is his for the taking. He’ll be back, just in time for dinner.

*jennie

Review: ‘Rundown’ doesn’t Rock enough
Star isn’t bad, but movie doesn’t make it
CNN.COMBy David Germain
Associated Press
Friday, September 26, 2003 Posted: 11:04 AM EDT (1504 GMT)

(AP) — Simon and Garfunkel were right. A rock feels no pain.

Wrestling-star-turned-action-hero The Rock takes a major licking and keeps on kicking in “The Rundown,” an earsplitting onslaught that hoists the basic Three Stooges premise — pratfalls and slapfests for laughs — to unsavory extremes.

It’s remarkable that a movie relying so heavily on sanitized sadism could land a PG-13 rating, while Hollywood’s ratings guardians would brand Woody Allen’s “Anything Else” with an R because of a few mild sexual innuendoes and a brief cocaine-snorting gag.

“The Rundown” essentially is a series of brutal WWE smackdowns hitched by a thin story about a bruiser mixing it up with tough guys in Los Angeles and Brazil (WWE boss Vince McMahon is an executive producer and his WWE Films arm earns a credit on the movie).

The Rock plays heavy-for-hire Beck, dispatched to the Amazon to bring home Travis (Seann William Scott), a rich guy’s smart-aleck son from a treasure hunt for a priceless golden artifact hidden in the jungle.

Actor-turned-director Peter Berg and his collaborators somehow landed Christopher Walken to co-star as mildly deranged villain Hatcher, a gold-mining tyrant who has enslaved the local population as diggers.

Hatcher and his henchmen, armed with guns, whips and vacuous expressions, are intent on keeping hold of Travis, certain he holds the key to finding the artifact. Mysterious bartender Mariana (Rosario Dawson) also hinders Beck’s mission to take Travis home, intent on finding the artifact for her own reasons.

Showmanship

Christopher Walken plays — what else? — a charismatic villain in “The Rundown.”
The Rock manages to lift “The Rundown” out of the spit-bucket category by sheer charisma honed over years of playing the showman in the ring. (“The Rundown” features an amusing cameo from another athletic-showman-turned-movie-hero, who’s now giving politics a go; have we spoiled the surprise for you?)

The Rock demonstrated a likable, unpretentious presence with his starring debut in last year’s dopey “The Scorpion King,” and he shows the same magnetism as a contemporary hero in “The Rundown.” The guy will never make the Oscar short list, but he has enough brooding menace and comic charm to play both the idol and the fool.

Co-star Scott, on the other hand, is back to playing the fool after his own ill-conceived stab at action hero (“Bulletproof Monk”). Best-known as wisenheimer Stifler in the “American Pie” flicks, Scott is beginning to wear out his butthead shtick.

As often as Beck lays out Travis with thunderous jabs, Scott is annoying enough that you wouldn’t mind if The Rock smacked him down just a few more times.

Big bam boom
Walken is essentially playing Walken, his staccato speech making dumb dialogue in R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt’s script seem funnier than it is.

Berg’s sound department seems to have borrowed the amplifier from “This Is Spinal Tap” and turned the volume up to 11, accenting the movie’s many, many body blows, kicks, punches, headbutts and gunshots with deafening booms.

The action sequences are ambitiously ridiculous, though it’s hard not to laugh at the prolonged fall Beck and Travis take down a jungle mountain side; Wile E. Coyote never took such a bottomless-pit tumble.

Like the classic wrestling good guy, Beck gets the stuffing knocked out of him, stands and delivers payback, then gets the stuffing knocked out of him, again and again.

And The Rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.

“The Rundown,” a Universal release, is rated PG-13 for adventure violence and some crude dialogue.

*thanks to rockcrazed

‘RUNDOWN’: ROCK IN ACTION
By Christian Toto
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
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We can smell what the Rock is cooking ? a budding B-movie film
career. It’s clear the wrestling sensation formerly known as Dwayne
Johnson has found his niche with “The Rundown,” another dumbed down action
yarn that treats audiences like punching bags. The only question left is
whether he will be shrewd enough to graduate to better fare.

Consider a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by Arnold Schwarzenegger
early on as a generational baton-passing from one muscle-bound lug to
another. Laugh all you want, but Mr. Schwarzenegger transformed his
career ? as he did his body via weights ? by aligning himself with
directors James Cameron (1984′s “The Terminator”) and Ivan Reitman (1988′s
“Twins”).

Will the Rock do the same? He better hurry before films like “The
Rundown” harden in our minds like celluloid cement.

“The Rundown” posits the Rock as a “retrieval agent” named Beck
chasing down spoiled rich kid Travis (Seann William Scott,essentially
revisiting his sidekick role from “Bulletproof Monk”) in the Amazonian
jungles. The pursuit leads the pair into a confrontation with Hatcher
(Christopher Walken), a despot who pays workers slave wages to mine for
gold.

A simmering resistance to Hatcher is led by Mariana, a gutsy
barkeep (Rosario Dawson, dignified amid the silliness). Soon, Beck, Travis
and Mariana are squaring off against Hatcher’s goons for a treasured
artifact and her people’s freedom.

The film’s deft opening sequence, in which Beck collars a bet
welcher hiding out in a bar, hints that the Rock is capable of more than
wrestling-level emotion. He’s cool with a glowering sense of rage
bubbling under that mountainous build.

Director Peter Berg (1998′s “Very Bad Things”) should be the go-to
auteur for all popcorn movie flotsam. Punches fly, limbs are crushed
and we’re meant to feel every achy moment of it.

The flakiest scenes involve Mr. Walken, who once again looks as if
he stumbled onto the set from another, unrelated project.

“The Rundown” is never dull ? how could it be with Mr. Walken
speechifying in that inimitable cadence? It also delivers a few clever set
pieces, including one in which Beck dukes it out with a tribe of much
smaller men who attack from the ground and the air.

Still, the film is for action purists only, and specifically those
who don’t mind teeth-grating dialogue and World Wrestling
Entertainment-grade histrionics.

**

WHAT: “The Rundown”

RATING: PG:13 (Coarse language, excessively violent action
sequences)

CREDITS: Directed by Peter Berg. Produced by Kevin Misher, Marc
Abraham and Karen Glasser. Screenplay by R.J. Stewart and James
Vanderbilt.

RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes

MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS

rockcrazed@hotmail.com has sent you an article from The Washington
Times.

The Rundown on The Rock Former wrestler’s monkey business on film set (interview)
By LOUIS B. HOBSON — Calgary Sun
HOLLYWOOD — From fans, producers, agents and studio moguls to monkeys, everyone wants a piece of The Rock.

Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, has become one of the hottest properties in Hollywood.

With one-time box-office action giants Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis all showing their age, Johnson, 32, is poised to be their successor.

After a brief cameo in The Mummy Returns, Johnson quickly got his own Mummy feature, The Scorpion King which grossed more than $400 million.

He’s already completed his third feature, a remake of Walking Tall, and opens on Friday as a bounty hunter in the action comedy The Rundown.

Johnson is used to adulation from fans, but he wasn’t prepared for the attention he received from his simian co-stars in The Rundown.

At one point in the film, Johnson and his co-star Seann William Scott are suspended by their feet by vines from the tops of trees when they are harassed by snarling monkeys.

The leader eventually swings from his tree and attaches himself to Johnson.

EXCITED CO-STARS

“All those monkeys were pretty horny and they all seemed to have a thing for me, but there was this one teenager who got particularly excited each time I walked on set. It was disconcerting to say the least. It’s more affection than I’ve ever wanted from a fan,” says Johnson.

Don’t get him wrong, Johnson loves his fans especially his legion of wrestling fans who he readily admits made him a superstar.

“If I hadn’t become The Rock, I wouldn’t be making movies. It was The Rock who turned my life around and that’s why I’m not about to ditch the name any time soon.”

Unlike many wrestling stars, Johnson owns his wrestling persona. Vince McMahon, chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment turned The Rock over to Johnson. In return, McMahon becomes an executive producer on all Johnson’s films.

It was through The Rock that Johnson was able to find a positive outlet for his aggression.

“I’m a guy who comes from a background that is very confrontational and visceral. From the time I was 13, I always seemed to be getting into fights. As I grew older the fights turned into assaults. It was really embarrassing for my family.”

SPECIAL AGENT ROCK?

Johnson was determined to be the first person in his family to graduate from college and realized that dream by getting a full football scholarship to the University of Miami.

“I studied criminology because I wanted to be a secret service agent. I wasn’t a good student. I cheated on most of my exams … ”

Johnson would likely have become a secret service agent except for one thing.

“It wasn’t until my junior year that I finally asked what kind of salary I could expect. When I learned I’d only be making about $55,000 a year and putting my life at risk, I knew it wasn’t the life or career for me.”

The Rock was a more natural fit for Johnson.

“The Rock was easy to play because he is essentially Dwayne Johnson with the volume turned way, way up.”

Johnson doesn’t wrestle any more, but he insists his heart will always be in the ring.

His heart also belongs to his college sweetheart who he married. He and Dany Garcia have a daughter, Simone.

Johnson, whose father is Samoan and mother is African-American, is grateful that “The Rock is colour blind because that is an incredible advantage in the entertainment business. I can be anything from the black guy or the Samoan guy to the Greek or Italian. People don’t see colour or nationality when they look at me.”

People will be seeing a great deal more of The Rock. Universal Pictures, who bankrolled The Scorpion King and The Rundown, are developing three movies for Johnson while almost every other major studio is sending him projects.

“I’d really like to do a sequel to The Rundown.” (More on The Rock)

*thnx to jennie and canoe.com

Are you ready to Rock? Wrestling star has what it takes to be Hollywood’s next big thing
By J. Freedom du Lac — Bee Pop Culture Writer

The Rock, aka Dwayne Johnson, made a name for himself as the guy you love to hate in professional wrestling. But in his new role as action-movie star, the 6-foot-5 wall of a man is finding himself loved by filmgoers and filmmakers alike. Sacramento Bee/Michael A. Jones

SAN FRANCISCO — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson does not do deference.

Because the man knows his role — the outrageous one that’s made him wrestling’s biggest superstar in stature, if not size, as the 6-foot-5, 250-pound slab of human granite is somewhat slight by the semi-sport’s skewed standards.

The Rock taunts his fans, telling them to shut up.

He harangues his opponents, derisively calling them “jabronis” (whatever those are) and detailing how he’s going to “lay the smack down” on them.

And he publicly antagonizes World Wrestling Entertainment chairman Vince McMahon, whom The Rock has called, among other amusing things, a “roody poo candy ass.”

About the only thing The Rock does seem to respect, in fact, is himself. So much so that he speaks of himself in the third person and frequently refers to himself as “The Great One” or “The Most Electrifying Man in Sports Entertainment.”

Yet, on a recent afternoon, Mr. Most Electrifying is uncharacteristically unplugged.

The man who typically struts around like a rooster — or, better yet, the rooster’s famous, four-letter synonym that rhymes with “Rock” — is humbly slouched in a chair inside a swanky hotel suite.

Here to promote “The Rundown,” an action-comedy that arrives in theaters Friday amid high expectations — for the film, and for its herculean headliner — The Rock is also fully clothed. This is a notable development for a guy who became famous wearing patent-leather boots, brief black shorts and a coat of body oil.

Even more notable is this: The Rock is discussing a challenger with actual respect.

And in the main event: The Rock vs. … acting.

“Acting is a challenge,” The Rock says softly, his volume turned way down — so much so that you almost have to strain to hear him over the hum of the ventilation system. “I want to grow as an actor. And I want to make every scene good and real.”

His hyper-expressive, silly-putty face is completely straight, offering not even the slighest hint of that trademark raised right eyebrow that would signal he’s not entirely serious.

Not even when he offers, later, that he wants to be the next James Dean.

Never mind that in his autobiography, “The Rock Says…” — a No. 1 New York Times best seller in 2000 — he says this: “Will The Rock be the next James Dean or Cary Grant or James Stewart? I don’t think so.”

The Rock rolls his bug eyes.

“That was written before I started acting,” he says. “I could just choke myself. I said those things when I hadn’t acted at all — and I didn’t have a vision to become an actor. I was just running my mouth.

“What a shock, right?”

Then again, there was this coda: “But (The Rock) could be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger … only better looking.”

How prescient.

Schwarzenegger — the bodybuilder-turned-movie star — is, of course, now attempting to flex his muscles in the state’s political arena.

And The Rock, 31, has emerged as the man most likely to fill Schwarzenegger’s shoes by filling theaters with box-office hit after box-office hit.

So far so good: After making his Hollywood debut in 2001 with a supporting role in “The Mummy Returns,” The Rock starred in a spinoff, “The Scorpion King,” which opened at No. 1 a year later and grossed nearly $100 million domestically.

“The fact that he headlined a movie that opened No. 1 is quite impressive, especially on his first real outing,” says Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box-office tracking company Exhibitor Relations. “The Rock is a box-office draw from the word go.”

Now comes Act II and word is growing, ever loudly, that he is, indeed, the New Arnold — thanks in large part to the Old Arnold:

While having lunch on the set of “The Rundown,” The Rock’s third film, Schwarzenegger was asked if he wanted to make a cameo. He agreed on the spot.

And so there is the 56-year-old actor, in the opening scene, passing The Rock’s reluctant-bounty-hunter character, Beck, in a noisy nightclub and saying: “Have a good time.”

Torch officially passed.

The Rock’s mind officially blown.

“I asked him where he came up with that line,” he recalls. “And he said, ‘You’re going where I’ve been.’ I was like, ‘Oh wow. That is cool.’”

Says Degarabedian: “If anybody can take Arnold’s place, it would be The Rock. And ‘The Rundown’ will be the true test — the thing that says to moviegoers and the industry that he’s arrived as the new action star to be reckoned with.”

Peter Berg suggests it’s a done deal.

Of course, Berg directed “The Rundown.” But still.

“He’s going all the way,” Berg says. “Rock may be the heir to Arnold’s throne, but he has a completely different quality. I think he can reinvent the whole concept of the action star and the action film.”

How so?

“Just look at him physically. He doesn’t have the intense sculpted quality that Sylvester Stallone and Schwarzenegger obsessed over. He’s a much more natural-looking human being. There’s a regularness to him that those guys never had.”

Regular being relative.

Even before he became The Rock, Dwayne Johnson’s life was atypical.

He was born in Hayward, into professional wrestling royalty: His father is Rocky Johnson, the first African American champion, and his maternal grandfather was Chief Peter Maivia,the first Samoan on the wrestling scene.

Blessed with a big, athletic body, Johnson excelled in football and was named high school All-American. A defensive lineman, he wound up on scholarship at the University of Miami, which won a national championship when he was a freshman. But Johnson battled injury throughout college and finished with an especially disappointing senior season.

After being ignored in the National Football League’s amateur draft, Johnson went north to try out for the Canadian Football League team in Calgary.

He made it — to the practice squad.

The take-home pay was roughly $175 U.S. per week, so Johnson shared an apartment with three teammates and salvaged a filthy mattress from behind a seedy motel.

Then Calgary cut him.

His football career over, he decided to get into the family business.

With his father’s help, Johnson got a crash course in wrestling. Eventually, he moved to Texas to train and compete on a minor-league circuit before the World Wrestling Federation brought him on board in 1996.

Dave Meltzer, the publisher of The Wrestling Observer newsletter, recalls Johnson’s WWF debut: “They announced him as Dwayne Johnson, and I asked one of the leading people in the company, ‘Who is this guy?’ They said it was Rocky’s son and Peter Mavia’s grandson.

“And then they said: ‘By the year 2000, he’s going to be the biggest star in the business.’ That was the prediction. And he beat it by roughly two years.”

But The Rock was not an immediate hit.

In fact, he wasn’t even The Rock; instead, he was Rocky Mavia — a good-guy character meant to be a fan favorite.

Oops.

“He totally flopped as Rocky Mavia,” Metzler says.

The WWF came up with an idea: Since the fans didn’t like him as a good guy, why not see how they respond if he’s a bad guy?

So Johnson “turned heel,” trading in his name and his old character, and emerged in 1998 as The Rock — an obnoxious, outlandish, trash-talking bad guy people would love to loathe.

In other words, he jokes, he became “Dwayne Johnson with the volume cranked up.”

In this way, the man with the multiethnic matinee-idol face became hugely popular. And it was merely a matter of time before he made the obvious jump to movies. A memorable March 2000 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” only increased the bound-to-be-a-star buzz.

“He has natural acting talent,” says Greg Dean Schmitz, who writes online movie previews for Yahoo! “I think he has some chops. And what prepares you better to be an action star — being a professional wrestler or doing ‘The Comedy of Errors’ in Central Park?”

Don’t laugh. “The Rundown” director Berg didn’t when he familiarized himself with The Rock’s work by watching wrestling DVDs.

“I was impressed by how much performing he does on a daily basis, and by the scope of his ability,” Berg says.

So here he is: Hulking Hamlet, The New Action Hero!

But there is at least one role he hasn’t yet perfected.

How do you explain your success?

He shrugs his oversized shoulders.

“I’ve worked hard and I was lucky enough to capitalize on a little bit of charisma,” he says.

His eyebrow inches up.

He knows he hasn’t sold this answer.

“What am I going to say? I’ve got all the charisma in the world?”

Respectable enough.

The Rock, from his book ‘The Rock Says …’ article
Chicago SunTimes

September 25, 2003

BY MIKE THOMAS Staff Reporter Advertisement

It is nearly 3 o’clock on a sunny late-summer afternoon, and the Rock, the swaggering WWE champ known to some as Dwayne Douglas Johnson, has yet to lay the smackdown upon anyone’s roody-poo candy ass. That will soon change.

In the most traditional sense, there’s been no smacking down — in patented WWE parlance, laying waste to one’s rassling adversaries, sometimes on pay-per-view — for quite some time now, as the Rock has taken temporary leave from playing the Most Electrifying Man in Sports Entertainment to flex thespianic chops (and copious muscles) in “The Rundown.” His latest and greatest big-screen adventure opens Friday.

His suit-wearing, tail-kicking character Beck, a good-hearted bounty hunter who dreams of being a chef, gets ridden like a bucking bronco by horny fanged howler monkeys (the story is rife with such goofiness) and administers lethal pummeling only when provoked beyond reason (very, very often).

Unlike his bland, caricaturish, Hollywood hero wannabe predecessors — Hulk Hogan and Jesse Ventura chief among them — the Rock can actually act. What’s more, he has natural comic timing, not to mention a gift for stylish skull-cracking. As triple threats go, Sammy Davis Jr. is a distant second.

Swaddled in casual Gucci and, as the Rock later reveals, “a corduroy thong on backward,” he saunters into a suite of his ultralux downtown hotel looking very much like himself, only far less imposing and cocksure. No searing lights, no blaring music, no bellowing spectators accompany his entrance, as they so often do. Just a couple of handlers. Also, neither eyebrow is arched (his signature expression), and sculpted pecs are not glistening. Then again, maybe they are.

At any rate, for all his heaps of cash (he’s reportedly up to $15 mil a picture) and boffo celebrity and bona fide celluloid mettle, the People’s Champion, the Brahma Bull (and this month’s GQ cover boy — he’s still reeling over it) is just a man. A rich, famous, dapper, supremely confident, impossibly cool movie star man, but a man nonetheless, one decidedly unlike his egomaniacal, Speedo-sporting alter ego.

There is little about the subdued 31-year-old Rock that screams International Player. Even outward telltale signs are few: no blinding bling-bling, no hundred-man posse (though it can become sizable depending on circumstances), no leggy models gleaming like cuff links on each powerful arm. Nonetheless, when out and about, he is often mobbed mercilessly, as he was while shuttling between local media appearances, and during a short-lived trip across the street to shop at Niketown, from which he was quickly whisked by a cadre of publicists and two less-than-hulking but exceedingly proficient bodyguards, one of whom currently stands watch just outside the door.

“For me, the hardest thing about fame and this newfound [movie] fame … is anonymity,” he says, digging into a late lunch of seedless grapes, dry toast and tuna. “It’s completely gone. No privacy whatsoever.”

But, hey, it comes with the territory. That’s the new attitude, anyway. In the late ’90s, when his perpetually pumped, trash-talking persona caught on and rabid Rock mavens came a-flocking, the Rock’s first reaction was to hide in plain view. “I found myself always walking like this [head down] and talking like this [whispered tones],” he says, “and it got to a point where I thought, ‘OK, well now I’m just walking around with a stupid-looking hat on and goofy glasses inside. And it’s ridiculous.’ So I just stopped that.”

*****

By an overwhelming margin, the Rock’s life is grand, far grander than he ever imagined it would be when, a mere seven years ago, he was making $40 a night in wrestling’s minor leagues and living with his parents. In May 1997, around the time things started to gel professionally, he married his college sweetheart Dany, a former Merrill Lynch vice president who now helps manage a hedge fund. They met one night in 1990 at a Florida bar. He, a freshman standout on the legendary Miami Hurricanes football squad (and, apparently, quite the action-getting ladies man), was enroute to a three-dude, six-chick sex romp, which he claims to have skipped on account of his newly pitter-pattering heart. A couple of years ago, Dany bore him a daughter, Simone, on whom he clearly dotes.

“Baby girls,” he says wistfully. “Nothing like that. When she was born, when I was holding her, I said, ‘Now I know what my parents were talking about, now I know how they feel.’ … Especially my mom. She always wants to keep me on the phone, just wants to hear my voice. And she just looks at me and [musses] my hair and it’s like, ‘Stop that!’ I said, ‘There are no guarantees, from marriage to work to life, but I guarantee I’ll love you for the rest of my life.’ ” Then, in an awestruck whisper, “Oh, man.”

Ever the smitten dad, he saves her phone messages and frequently plays them back for instant grins. A recent one, he says, floored him: “I’m so proud of you, daddy!” she squeaked.

“It’s like, s—!” the smiling Rock exclaims, grabbing a pillow and flinging it with frightening force against the wall. “Kill me now!”

*****

In the race to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger as Action Hero King, “The Rundown” may well win the Rock pole position. As luck or fate would have it, at the very moment Schwarzenegger is inching out of show biz and into politics, the Rock has emerged to fill the void.

In a sense, the Governator himself has even bequeathed his crown. “Have fun,” he tells Beck as the two stroll past each other in “The Rundown’s” exhilarating opening sequence. Rarely has such a common phrase been laden with so much meaning.

And so it continues, the ascent. “The Mummy Returns” and “The Scorpion King” laid groundwork, but this is IT, his most significant moment of reckoning to date. Other lesser ones will follow. A reimagining of 1973′s “Walking Tall” (the violent tale of a Tennessee sheriff who becomes a one-man wrecking crew) recently wrapped in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Rock will soon begin work on “The Seahunter.”

Under contract with the WWE through next year, he’ll doubtless return to the ring someday soon, but only when he can offer it his undivided attention. Doing double duty, he says, almost killed him. But more important, the sport that helped make him what he is today, catapulted him from penniless obscurity to $500-shirt-wearing renown in no time flat, deserves nothing less, and he knows it.

For now, though, thumb-wrestling will have to suffice. One, two, three, and the Smackdown, the Battle Royale is on. “Tag-team! Haaa!” the Rock shouts, illegally employing a neighboring digit for extra leverage. His challenger will have none of it. Intense skirmishing continues briefly. Then it happens. The Rock spots an opening and — Bam! — pin. Game over. Victory is his. “Thanks for letting me win,” he says.

There was, he is told, no “letting” whatsoever. Just another hapless jabroni who failed to smell what the Rock was cooking.

“Will The Rock be the next James Dean or Cary Grant or James Stewart? I don’t think so. But he could be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger … only better looking.”

–

Grunt-and-groan champ turns his brutish charm and acting chops toward becoming Action King

The Low “Down” on The Rock interview
By Kit Bowen, Hollywood.com Staff

Big and bad as he is, The Rock isn’t nearly as intimidating as one might think.

For six years The Rock roared his way successfully through the wide, wide world of wrestling, until a bit part in the mummified actioner The Mummy Returns (2001) ushered him into the wide, wide world of Hollywood. With top billing in its 2002 sequel, The Scorpion King, he was firmly established as moviedom’s brawniest new action hero who can throw the bad guys around like dishrags, but with a glint in his eye, an arched brow and sly smile, still let you know he gets the joke.

Meeting The Rock, whose real name is Dwayne Johnson, up close and personal is an experience fraught with trepidation. But the wrestler-turned-actor is more friendly honeybee than stinging Scorpion King, as he gives us the lowdown on his second major film, the action comedy The Rundown, which also stars Seann William Scott, Rosario Dawson and Christopher Walken.

The Rundown on “Rundown”

The Rundown tells the story of The Rock’s character Beck, a “retrieval expert” who will go in and get whatever his loan-sharking employer wants–money, property, a person. Beck is good at what he does but is tired of the life and wants out of the business. He agrees to do one last job in order to wipe the slate clean (always a big mistake) by traveling into the heart of the Amazon jungle to bring back his employer’s wayward, wisecracking son Travis (Scott). Of course, things don’t go as planned.

“The first thing that hit me about the The Rundown was the simple story,” he says. “I used to say, it should only take a certain amount of brainpower in order to follow the story. When I read Beck, I knew it would be an interesting character for me to play, that I could draw on some personal experiences of my own,” he adds. “Like having somewhat of a checkered past, from all the trouble I used to get into.”

As Beck gets in deeper than he wanted, he finds himself caught in a quest for a golden treasure lead by his quarry Travis as well as a rebel uprising lead by a beautiful local bartender (Dawson).

“The fight sequences were difficult, especially the rebel fight sequence. Those guys were amazing–and they were only this big,” he says, holding his hand up to his torso. “They look even smaller next to me, but man, they were quick.”

Fighting was the easy part. To play Rundown’s contemporary hero, The Rock also had to step up the acting from his appropriately monosyllabic turn in The Scorpion King. “Honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t get an Oscar nomination,” he quips. “With lines like ‘You go get woman or I take head!’ What could be more powerful than that?

“Having [Rundown's director] Peter Berg around was like having my own personal acting coach on set every day,” he continues. “Since he’s an actor himself, he had my best interests at heart. He’s a real guy’s guy and we became really great friends. I’m also especially proud of the work I did with [co-star] Christopher Walken.”

Walken plays Hatcher, a sadistic overlord who uses the Brazilian people as slaves to dig his goldmines and forces them to live in a slum called El Dorado. Hatcher doesn’t take too kindly to Beck messing up the good thing he’s got going.

Is Walken as eccentric off screen as he typically plays on it? “Chris is pretty much the same way he is on screen. He talks in that same rhythm and pitch. But a real sweetheart of a guy.”

The Rock does feel a responsibility to keep things lighthearted and gun-free (his character’s only weapons are his fists) for his legions of young fans who worshiped him as a wrestling god. “It’s something I’m conscious of,” he says. “But it’s difficult because I want to do R-rated movies as well. It’s a craft?with the exception of porn!”

Wrestlemania

The Rock the actor knows he has a lot to learn about this craft, but benefited greatly from his time spent as The Rock the wrestler.

“Certainly physically, with a background in wrestling, I learned how to throw a punch, take a punch in the theatrics of wrestling. Really exaggerating falling or throwing somebody,” he says. “Having that platform for the last six years, of having to entertain every night, was great experience.

“I also always loved speaking on the microphones and delivering monologues live,” he adds. “Not knowing what I was really going to say and waiting to respond to fans, and of course, working in front of a camera. That helped me. I’ve always compared theater to wrestling. Wrestling was my theater. The arena was my theater, the ring was my stage.”

Then he explains, “For film acting everyone is always saying ‘Keep it real, man.’ and a lot of the times, it just becomes B.S. But what I learned is that even though you can interpret your lines in different ways, as long as you say them from here,” pointing to his heart, “from an instinctively, honest-to-god feeling, then it is real and cannot be wrong.”

Changing Spaces

So, is The Rock the next great American hero?

Getting the approval from one of the masters of action-heroism certainly helps cement The Rock’s place in the pantheon of action-adventure stars. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator- turned-gubernatorial candidate, makes a cameo appearance in The Rundown to wish Beck good luck. It is almost a symbolic changing of the guard.

“Ironically, that’s what it’s turned out to be, but it never was intended to be set up that way,” The Rock admits. “It was as innocent as [Schwarzenegger] having lunch with me on the set and Peter asking if he wanted to make a cameo. Arnold was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it. I’ll shoot it right now.’ We were on the set in five minutes.

“Peter asked Arnold what he wanted to say to me in the scene and he told him he wanted to tell me to just have fun. ‘Rock’s going where I’ve been and I want to tell him to have a good time.’ I’ve seen the movie a few times and that moment still gets me. Means a lot.”

Would he want to follow Arnold’s footsteps into the political arena too?

“No way. I do wish him luck, though, ’cause he is a friend of mine. That’s a major commitment and sacrifice and once you make a decision like that, you prepare yourself to sacrifice much.”

One suspects, though, if the Rock ever did get into politics, he wouldn’t take all that mumbo jumbo too seriously.

The Rock Takes the ‘Rundown’ Challenge (article)
Wed, Sep 24, 2003, 06:09 PM PT
By Vanessa Sibbald

Even growing up, The Rock never wanted to be a superhero. Born Dwayne Johnson, the boy grew up to gain fame as the WWF legend The Rock, but he says there’s an important difference between him and Superman — flaws.

I was never a fan of Superman. I was always attracted to characters that were more relatable and I could just never relate to Superman — it was cool he could run and he could do all that stuff, but I could never do that,” he tells Zap2it.com.

So it only makes sense in making his first action film, he’d choose a character a little more human than your standard action movie hero.

“I was looking forward to, after the ‘Scorpion King,’ challenging myself a little more — actually a lot more — as an actor,” he says, “and be funny and run the risk of making myself look foolish at times and not have to be a cat who is big and bad and not flawed and ultra cool.”

Tailored specifically for the former wrestling star, “The Rundown” stars The Rock as Beck, a former football player who works as a marker for a local moneyman. However, Beck has bigger dreams like opening up his own restaurant, but before he can quit he’s given a final mission to collect his boss’ son Travis (Seann William Scott) in the Amazon jungle and bring him back to the States. Once in Brazil, Beck hits a few snags when he finds out that quite a few people don’t want Travis to leave, including Travis himself. Co-starring in the film is Christopher Walken as Hatcher, a slightly unhinged despot who has turned the small town Travis lives in into a gold mining empire — or prison, depending on which side you’re on, and Rosario Dawson as a local barmaid Travis is sweet on.

It was The Rock’s willingness to poke fun at himself, which makes the film fun to watch, according to actor/director Peter Berg (“Very Bad Things”).

“Rock — and I think it starts with him — is willing to allow himself to look less than perfect at times, is willing to let a monkey crawl on his head, is willing to ask a little man, ‘Let’s just not do this please,’ is willing to fall down a hill like a bouncing ball and not worry about being quite so tough,” he says. “If the movie works and people like it it’s because it’s fun and it’s not this exercise in righteous macho-ness.”

Walken was also necessary to add the necessary bad guy. But here again, Walken’s interpretation of the role is a little different than usually seen in action films.

“The most interesting thing he said to me is ‘I like to find a little bit of Elvis in every role that I play.’ And on his refrigerator he had a tiny black and white picture of Elvis Presley,” recalls Berg. “And if you look back on his roles now, it does make sense. I don’t thing I’m giving away anything too secretive, but that is one of his things.”

Despite the film’s strong cast, Berg wanted to make sure the film had a distinctive flavor that would help it stand out in a summer full of action films — many of which also mixed comedy with action. To do this he started researching fight scenes in an effort to “create a little breathing room so that people could watch it and feel like they were watching something reasonably fresh.”

“I watched every old Jet Li film, every old Jackie Chan films, lots of Hong Kong films — I was watching everything I could and I couldn’t figure it out,” he explains. “And I get to this fight that John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ — it’s a fight in an alley between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David — this fight is the ugliest, dirtiest– it just went on and on and they stop and they start and every punch looks like it hurts and at the end, they’re just done. It was funny and it just felt a little bit different. I’m like, ‘What if it just feels like you feel the punches? You feel the hits?’”

“We tried to go back to the days in which guys really punched it out,” Berg adds. “Even if he’s got some skill and he can catch a whip it’s still going to hurt, it’s not glamorous. If it works and we have carved out a little bit of breathing room, I owe it to John Carpenter.”

The effect worked, mixing fast edits with strong fight scenes and solid humor, “The Rundown” sparkles with an energy that will likely send The Rock to the top of the heap of future action stars. If nothing else, The Rock proves that he has enough charisma to easily carry a film — not that he’ll stop there.

“I just want to continue to grow. I want to be a good actor and not just a celebrity who does movies,” he says,

The Rock Opera article
A schlock hero is born?almost?in The Rundown.
By Michael Agger
Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2003, at 2:01 PM PT

Seann William Scott smells what the Rock is cooking

OK, we get it. Arnold Schwarzenegger is in politics, Sylvester Stallone is burning up the charity golf circuit, Steven Seagal is strictly straight to video, and Jean-Claude Van Damme is and remains a small guy from Belgium. The time has come for a new action star, and the Rock wants to assume the throne. He’s certainly poised, having already appeared in two faux-ancient Egypt movies?The Mummy Returns (2001) and The Scorpion King (2002)?with his wrestling fans turning out in large numbers to watch him run around the desert and body-slam stuff. Now, in The Rundown (Universal), he traverses the green jungles of Brazil in his very own star vehicle.

For those few who remain wrestling virgins, the Rock’s real name is Dwayne Johnson, and his most common in-ring sobriquet is “The People’s Champion.” In terms of the sport, however, his family essentially came over on the Mayflower. His grandfather was the Samoan wrestler High Chief Peter Maivia, and his father was Rocky Johnson, a beloved grappler during the Superfly Snuka era of the late ’70s and early ’80s. When it came time for the Rock to enter the ring, he started out with a good-guy persona, but he became really popular once he started wearing nice clothes and Rolex watches and acting more like a badass. He was the wrestler your girlfriend could love. Of late, the Rock has not been wrestling much, but it’s hard to find fault with that decision. You too would try to broaden your horizons if your signature tag line was: “Do you smell what the Rock is cooking?!”

The first sign that the role the Rock plays in The Rundown will be a departure is his chest, which is fully covered by a shirt. He’s Beck, a bounty hunter who doesn’t like to use guns, for some unexplained reason. The head-knocking begins immediately in a nightclub, and that’s where the Austrian Oak himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, walks by our hero in a dark corridor and tells him to “Have fun!” This is a nice passing-of-the-torch moment, but it also invites an unenviable comparison. The Rock doesn’t have the articulated body that made Arnold, for a brief muscular moment, the Eighth Wonder of the World. In his prime, Arnold also didn’t require a puny thing like character development; he was impossible not to watch. And his Austrian accent provided built-in comic relief. Moments like the one in Conan the Barbarian (1982), when a Mongol general asks Arnold, “What is best in life?” and he answers, “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women,” were ineffably weird and unforgettable. A new schlock hero was born.

The Rock, however, needs a character, something with which to flex his acting muscles. In The Rundown, his main identifiable trait is that he’s a cool customer?unruffled, committed to the task at hand?but he is perhaps too cool. When Beck gets angry, the menacing line he delivers seems more suited to a PowerPoint presentation: “You can choose Option A or Option B.” This is not the stuff that camp action stars are made of. When the Rock does mix it up, he’s pretty good: He has a convincing way of throwing around his body in a heedless manner, and he pulls off an impressive move where he wraps his enemies in his legs and then flips them in a circle. There’s an excellent moment when he collapses a tower of bad guys by throwing himself through a support pillar. The big showdown has the Rock fighting an entire compound of enemies, in the fine tradition of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) or, perhaps more memorably, Stallone’s Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985).

The Rock’s acting is perhaps best described as facially located: He does a lot of looking to the right and to the left, and “The People’s Eyebrow,” as he once deemed it, gets quite a workout. His comic foil is Seann William Scott, who plays Travis, a wisecracking graduate student (a rare breed) searching for a precious golden artifact. Standing in his way is Hatcher (Christopher Walken), an evil military-type presiding over a gold mine where Indians dig with their hands and are mercilessly exploited by his henchmen. Johnny Depp proved in this summer’s Pirates of the Caribbean that a commercial blockbuster can provide a little breathing room for an actor to deliver an inspired, freewheeling performance. Walken does not follow suit; he overdelivers a lot of Col. Kurtz speeches and sometimes, mid-tirade, betrays an “easy payday” smirk. The token girl is the young Afro-Cuban-Indian-Irish-Puerto Rican actress Rosario Dawson?comely bartender by day, respected rebel leader by night. She has the ability to toss off natural line readings while holding an M-16, which means she’ll never have to look hard for work in Hollywood.

With the business about lost icons and copious bullwhips, The Rundown is clearly aiming for some fragment of the magic of the Indiana Jones series. (Scott even bears a faint and presumably unintended resemblance to Harrison Ford.) Where the two movies depart is at their target audience. George Lucas wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) as an homage to the adventure comics he read as a child; the whole movie is infused with an all-ages innocence. The Rundown, like many recent action movies, is aggressively adolescent. It hearkens back to the time in a young man’s life when humping monkeys were funny, when a promise didn’t count if your fingers were crossed, when debating pointless hypothetical questions (“Who would win a fight between Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali?”) held a fascination, and when professional wrestling offered endless, senseless entertainment.

Also on MSN

A rundown on `The Rundown’ Review
The Rock is pretty good. There’s action. And Christopher Walken
George Thomas
Beacon Journal

Myles Aronowitz, Universal Studios

The Rock (left) and Seann William Scott on the run in The Rundown.

Amazing what happens when you take off the ornate headdress and skirt that the Rock, nee Dwayne Johnson, wore in The Scorpion King. There may be hope for the guy as an actor after all.

Let’s not go overboard and think that we have another Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart or Al Pacino on our hands, but the Rock shows that he may have what it takes to fill the black hole that’s plagued the action genre since the likes of Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger lost their platinum touches.

We saw little hope of that in his debut in The Scorpion King. However, in The Rundown, it’s as if there is a completely different guy on the screen. He’s funny, possesses all the right moves and, more importantly, the scriptwriter doesn’t have his character of Beck resort to those trite one-liners that have invaded pop culture, courtesy of the Terminator films.

Much of his character’s appeal comes because of the chemistry he possesses with his co-star Seann William Scott (the American Pie films).

The Rundown is little more than a buddy movie, but it works and at times quite well. The Rock and Scott fire off insults and throw punches, all the while making the audience buy into their scenario, and it’s one that sounds quite familiar.

An enforcer for a bookie, we know Beck is a bad ass because, in a highly charged opening scene, he tells his “employer” that he doesn’t want to hurt the quarterback of a football team and his offensive linemen because they have a chance of winning. Then when the QB doesn’t comply with his request, Beck is given no choice and promptly lays waste to all of them. And, yes, he completes the job.

But Beck has a soft side, too. He wants nothing more than to be free of his current career and open his own restaurant. His boss gives him that opportunity and promises him $250,000 if he brings back his weasel of a son, Travis (Scott), from deep in the Amazon jungle.

Travis is nothing but a con artist with delusions of grandeur. He wants to be a well-known archaeologist and he’s hot on the trail of an ancient artifact that is potentially worth millions. Beck isn’t exactly sympathetic to his goals after finding him, however, and plans to yank him out and collect his fee. If only things were that simple.

Travis’ local employer, Hatcher (Christopher Walken), knows that his associate is close to finding the priceless treasure and has plans for it himself.

Travis also has to deal with local rebels fighting against Hatcher, who want to sell the object.

Taken for what it is, The Rundown is nothing more than a mindless slam-bang foray into the action genre, and the Rock is perfectly cast.

Unlike his other career as a pro wrestler, this role requires no heavy lifting. The Rock turns Beck into a lethal gentle giant with a conscience, and he’s even likable because The Rock gives him charisma, charm and intelligence.

After a couple of misfires with movies such as Bulletproof Monk, Scott has finally found a movie to take advantage of his smart aleck charm. And his chemistry with the Rock elevates his and his partner’s performance.

They are given a script that has an engaging story and enough material for its actors to both shine. But it’s inconceivable that they were able to do so without the direction of Peter Berg (Very Bad Things). Berg resists the urge to go over the top in The Rundown, leaving many of the action cliches on the cutting room floor.

Although he relies too much on slow motion camera work, enough to make you feel dizzy, he gives The Rundown a comic slant that comes off fresh even though we know we’ve seen and heard it before.

But given the state of the buddy/action film-genre these days, we’ll take it.

The Rock Rips Up the Red Carpet

September 23, 2003
DWAYNE “The Rock” JOHNSON trades in his ‘Scorpion King’ throne to save lives and battle evil in his new action/adventure/comedy ‘The Rundown,’ coming out Friday. Monday night, we caught the wrestler-turned-actor and his action pack on the red carpet at their Hollywood premiere!

Johnson plays “Beck,” an employee of an underworld kingpin who has sent him to the Amazon to rescue his son Travis (SEANN WILLIAM SCOTT). Travis disappeared while searching for a priceless artifact. But things heat up when they discover an evil gold-mining exec (CHRISTOPHER WALKEN) is after the same treasure. And to complicate matters, they both fall for Mariana (ROSARIO DAWSON).

Johnson says this role was quite different from playing a Scorpion King, but it was a welcome change. “The last two movies I’ve done — the only two movies I’ve done — were period movies,” he says. “So I was looking forward to doing something contemporary and playing a character that was complex and had a fairly dark past, but at the same time trying to inject humor and keep it interesting.”

Johnson also says teaming up with ‘American Pie’ star Scott was not what he imagined. “I was expecting ‘Stiffler’ but instead I get this guy who’s buffed up and imposing.”

Academy Award winner Walken says working with Johnson was nothing less than great. “He’s a very talented guy. He’s very gifted and charming — I really like him.”

Director PETER BERG says the action hero was game for just about any life-endangering stunt. “The Rock is uniquely qualified to do stunts. We knew it would be really cool to see his face flying through the air … it really makes the audience suspend their disbelief because it’s really happening,” he says. “Every time we dropped him off a tree or smashed him in the head with a rock we would just hold our breath!”

Watch ET tonight to see more of the Rock in action!

credit:etonline