Mon, April 5, 2004
In Rod We Trust
The Rock is great, but without his plank of cedar, he wouldn't be Walking Tall.
Walking Tall is exactly the kind of movie that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson should be making right now. Full of action, light on distractions like plot and characterization, but rapaciously moving forward, no matter what. In other words, it may be pulp, but it's a real page-turner. As with his last film, Peter Berg's The Rundown, this movie is a stark black-and-white conflict between noble good and pure evil, sprinkled with fun situations and quirky characters. Where The Rundown pitted The Rock against devilish mastermind Christopher Walken with the help of the spazzy Sean William Scott and the alluring Rosario Dawson, Walking Tall has him battling devilish mastermind Neal McDonough, assisted by the spazzy Johnny "Jackass" Knoxville and the exceedingly alluring Ashley Scott. The Rundown is the superior film, but only by a hair. If Walking Tall had the budget to throw in a few larger set pieces and an extra explosion or two, they'd be equals. Neither is a contender for Best Screenplay, but come on. Not everything has to be. I'm much more impressed by films that are content to be entertaining than films that work so hard at aspiring to greatness. Walking Tall is successful as a rousing actioner with plenty of guts and not much brains; I'd gladly watch ten of those before I sat through another Angels in America or Magnolia.
For the sake of formality, Walking Tall connects its shootouts and smackdowns by means of a story about a small town in the Pacific Northwest (it could easily pass for the outlying areas of Vancouver) that has been devastated by economic hardship and devolved into a den of prostitution, gambling, and drugs. It's the typical 2D movie version of a town in decline. See Pottersville, or Hill Valley circa 1985-A. Neal McDonough (whose riveting intensity you loved in Boomtown and Minority Report and Band of Brothers) is the bad guy; he inherited the sawmill and shut it down, opening a sleazy casino as the only alternative for employment. Not content with merely dragging the town into sin, he also sets himself up as a drug dealer and buys the local sheriff so his casino security thugs basically run the town for him. This is all well and good, until we learn that his evil casino has become the last resort, employment-wise, of the fetching young Ashley Scott, who apparently used to date The Rock before he went off to the military. When The Rock comes back to town, he quickly learns that all is not as he left it, and now Ashley's a stripper in the casino peep show booth, his dad's unemployed after a devoted career at the mill was terminated, and his sister's kid is experimenting with drugs. Plus, McDonough cheats at a pick-up football game, so we know he's not just evil during working hours. Like me, The Rock is able to stomach the sleaziness and economic decline, but seeing poor Ashley reduced to tramping is the last straw. He doesn't say so in the dialogue, but you can tell that he agrees with me that she was the only good thing about the WB's Birds of Prey and she single-handedly made it the best show on television during its short run. I think he also liked her in S.W.A.T. when she managed to exude sassy volatility and flash a tongue-piercing all while breaking up with Colin Farrell in less than thirty seconds of screen time. She's a keeper! And he's not going to let McDonough make her feel like a piece of meat.
So, he goes on a freaking rampage. It's actually his second, because of an earlier skirmish over weighted dice at the craps table, but this time (you guessed it) it's personal. And, this time, he fetches that all-important wooden pole from the bed of his pickup truck before he gets started. (The log narrowly edges out Johnny Knoxville for the second-most screen time of any character in the movie.) He smashes the People's Cudgel into everything from ulnae to slot machines, and – yadda, yadda, yadda – The Rock is the new sheriff! Who says politics isn't fun? Of course, Neal McDonough makes the stupid but requisite move of waging all-out war against the new sheriff, something that he'd never be able to keep quiet – even if he were to win, the town would be on to his dastardly ways and he'd be in prison within days. But anyway, he goes after The Rock, and right in the middle of the steamy sex scene in which the lovely Ashley Scott – one day after The Rock's return from an eight year absence – throws herself at him. Of course, savvy filmgoers will recognize this hasty intercourse as a little something we call "justification." See, because she's got her top off, it justifies about ten minutes of her crawling around in a hail of gunfire, brandishing a pistol in a sexy red bra. Those crafty writers! There should be an Oscar just for that.
So, yes, the plot is pretty weak and there isn't much time spent on the characters. (Clocking in at only 83 minutes – almost as short as The Emperor's New Groove – this movie is really just four fight scenes, an explosion, a girl in her bra, and the dissolves between those.) But who cares? You know the plot: bad guy ruins boyhood town, good guy crusades for justice. You know the characters: bad guy, good guy, sexy girl, good guy's sidekick, good guy's plank of wood. Yeah, they're one-dimensional (except for the board; it has all three), but this is that kind of movie. It's not like Affliction where it's supposed to be about characters or story. Then, unidimensional, cookie-cutter characters were offensive; here, not. In fact, the most time spent on characterization is a quick laundry-list style introduction, monologized by Johnny Knoxville in order to detail his transition from youthful prankster to twentysomething rocker to boozing drug fiend to felon to clean-and-sober slacker. Maybe 90 seconds, tops. The Rock's characterization is even quicker, telegraphed entirely by his green army rucksack and his white mom and black dad (Irv from Everwood). (The producers chose to sidestep the complicated explanation of why a Samoan guy would grow up in the Pacific Northwest and decided to just make The Rock a mulatto.) Ashley's characterization is taking her shirt off, and that's it. Nobody else gets any, but that doesn't hurt the movie at all. Because the movie isn't a soulful exploration of one man's journey home. It's not a statement about small-town economic hardship. It's simply an 83-minute revenge rampage. Take that feeling you get when some guy cuts you off on the freeway, tease it out to 83 minutes, add a big hunk of wood, and there you have Walking Tall. Not life-changing, but not boring either. Quick, neat, and tidy. I'm all for it. In fact, I think The Rock should remake all of Joe Don Baker's films. I would love to see him adapt Final Justice and I'm sure it could be done on a budget even smaller than that of Walking Tall. And Mitchell? Oh, yeah. I'm salivating already. Put Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in the Linda Evans role ("I'm sleeping with you on spec.") and you've got yourself a surefire classic.
