I was looking forward to writing a double-feature tonight, reviewing “The Rundown” and “House of 1000 Corpses,” but life sucks sometimes, and I don’t get to do everything I want. To anyone in this country who’re thinking of seeing “1000 Corpses,” I strongly, strongly advise you to wait for the DVD. The local theaters are running a heavily edited version that runs about 30 minutes shorter than it was originally released, and you won’t understand shit. I can’t comment on what I haven’t seen, so out of respect for Rob Zombie, I’ll just save this review for when I’ve actually watched more than an hour’s worth of footage.
The WNMC was a bit early this week and ended up seeing “The Rundown” on a Tuesday night, instead of the regular Wednesday. If you’ve seen the trailer for The Rock’s latest attempt at movie stardom, you have probably already surmised what I’m about to repeat here. Basically, this is a guy flick, which in hollywood-y technical terms means fiery automobile explosions, bullet-time-wannabe fight scenes and witty banter, in generous, generous amounts.
There’s an important scene at the very beginning of the film (although it’s not important to the story in any way) where The Rock is shown entering a bar, just as (surprise) Arnold Schwarznegger steps out. Arnold walks right past him, saying “Have fun” over his shoulder as The Rock gives him the People’s Eyebrow. I thought that was a cute way of welcoming The Rock into the action genre that Arnold had embodied over the past decade, and if this movie is any indication, he’s really got his work cut out for him.
I thought that “The Rundown” was a breakthrough for The Rock not because it was good (it wasn’t) or he was good (he wasn’t), but because it was a pretty decent action movie. I know it’s difficult to imagine how a bad movie with a bad actor could still be called “decent,” but that’s the nature of the action genre I suppose. All an action movie has to do to be deemed successful is keep you from yawning for 120 minutes; such is its singularity of purpose.
This isn’t “The Fugitive” or “Under Siege” or even, god forbid, “Goldeneye.” But it’s not “Tomb Raider,” either. Like I said, it was pretty decent.
So instead of pointing out the stuff I didn’t like about this movie (quite a few), I’ll just talk about the stuff I did like, for a change. I liked how The Rock had two distinct facial expressions, instead of the rather singular mask he used for the entire 2 hours of Scorpion King (and indeed, for most of his WWF/E career). I liked how the movie had wonderful, sweeping cinematography and how the Portugese looked like they hailed from Novaliches (watch out for Ernie Reyes, Jr. in a fantastic cameo). I also liked Christopher Walken’s tooth fairy monologue, and Seann William Scott’s thunderfoot, although I just could not see the point of that Irish pilot. I was also grateful for the lack of a token romance angle (which is often just an action-movie trick for keeping the excitement level up between fights).
I can’t really say much else without throwing around some pretty big spoilers, so let’s just leave it at that. Using our brand-new action-movie-only non-rating system, I give this movie 700 out of 1000 bullets, because I can definitely smell what the Rock is cookin’.