Here comes everybody (5/24/04)
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The Rundown. [Peter Berg, 2003. Written by R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt.]
There’s an awkward moment, shortly after the requisite Dramatic Hush [“It’s quiet...it’s
too quiet...”] falls over the South American jungle hamlet ruled by evil imperialist mineowner and Mad Pharaoh of the Amazon Christopher Walken, as his mercenaries assume their positions, cock their AKs, and wait for the good guys, The Rock and Seann William Scott, to make their entrance and commence the apocalyptic shootout that will free Revolutionary Barmaid [no really] Rosario Dawson from their clutches, liberate the indigenous tribes Walken has enslaved and forced to labor in the gigantic terraced entrance he has opened into the pit of Hell, and retrieve a priceless Spielbergian archaeological artifact stolen by Walken’s henchmen, in order that its powers may be turned to good — when, in what is apparently meant to be comic/ironic anticlimax, instead of the expected avenging gunslingers, Mad-Hatter Scottish bush pilot Ewan Bremner suddenly materializes out of nowhere and is discovered strolling down the main drag into the center of town, playing the bagpipes. It is precisely here that you realize that Peter Berg cannot resist putting quotation marks around his final action sequence, because he simply does not realize that he isn’t Quentin Tarantino; and that somebody is going to have to explain it to him — somebody much more patient than I am, who will be willing to repeat everything loudly and slowly, probably a great many times, until the message finally is absorbed. And then, if he still doesn’t get it, bust a cap in his ass.
Until this relapse reminded me of his prior sins I had nearly been willing to forgive the author of the abominable [but, admittedly, appropriately-named]
Very Bad Things, since until he veered off the rails he hadn’t been doing a bad job of telling a rather entertaining story: The Rock, represented here as a reluctant but very professional badass [named, improbably, “Beck”] who has been impressed into the service of an unsavory mobster, having established his bona fides by walking into a nightclub and stomping a roomful of professional football players to collect a gambling debt from a dilatory quarterback with a weakness for speculation, returns to the office to beg his employer for dismissal from his obligations, only to hear the old familiar “just one more job” speech from Mister Big — who, it develops, wants our hero to fly into the wilds of the Amazon to retrieve his ne’er-do-well son Scott, a Stanford dropout who has, it seems, wandered off to look for lost cities in the jungle just when he is needed to provide a human sacrifice, or something. After running this errand, perhaps, The Rock will be permitted to retire from this stressful and essentially unproductive career as collections samurai and allowed to pursue his heart’s desire, which is to open a restaurant [“small, no more than ten or fifteen tables”], and do what he really wants to do, i.e., cook.
Sighing mightily, our hero acquiesces, and launches himself into the heart of darkness [not actually Brazil but Hawaii: the producers considered shooting on location but backed off after their scouting expedition was waylaid by real bandits][ah, everyone’s a critic], where in quick succession he meets the principals, establishes that all-important action-flick-buddy love/hate relationship with Scott [Ms. Dawson, naturally, serves as apex of the triangle, not that there’s much room for romance in this scenario], is confronted with the all-important motivational conflict between professional necessity and the realization that if Scott [doing a fairly amusing Stifler interpretation of Indiana Jones] is allowed to dig up the lost treasure he has finally located it will bankroll the oppressed masses in their righteous uprising against Walken, sails through the air in a Jeep, rolls down a mountainside, dives [of course] over a waterfall, beats up all the bad guys in a mining-town bar and all the good guys in a jungle clearing, and hangs ensnared upside down from a tree while an enraged monkey tries to hump his face.
There are some unusually inept quotes from Spielberg [the collapsing-room treasure-vault scene in particular was very poorly designed], an overuse of shakycam closeups in the fight scenes, a rather overextended moment of truth when the Rock has to, as it were, reach for his spinach in the final shootout, and a lot of gratuitous cutaways to Walken mugging for the camera when the director ran out of other ideas, but the fights are nicely choreographed [the Tarzan-homage rope-swinging sequence in particular], and, though I am very reluctant to refer to the apparent compatibility of the two principals as “chemistry”, they do work well together, and it’s difficult to resist the temptation to speculate what premise might serve as basis for a sequel.
Mainly, however, I carry away the memory of a charming moment when The Rock and the rebel leader, having pummeled one another into mutual respect, argue through a translator whether Ali could have beaten Tyson. The rebel is skeptical, but The Rock successfully presses the affirmative case, and the dispute ends in an amicable chorus of “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” — apparently the only English phrase known in this corner of the globe. This is entirely plausible, because the legend of Ali is indeed universal, and at the height of his career he was the most famous man in the world, known and idolized by far more people than idle poseurs like the Pope and the President of the United States. It is also, in a way, self-referential, as Brendan Fraser discovered when he arrived in Morocco to shoot
The Mummy Returns and found out that none of the natives knew or cared who he was, but all of them wanted to meet The Rock: Mr. Johnson, thanks in no small part to his native gifts but mainly because of the globe-girdling reach of Vince McMahon’s media empire, is now internationally famous; and his continued rise to movie stardom is, accordingly, inevitable. Unlike other contemporary expressions of historical necessity like the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the market domination of Windows XP, this should prove entirely enjoyable to watch.
____________Bang bang, her baby shot her down (10/18/03)
