Man, remember when The Rock used to have hair?

I know his hairline was doing him no favors by the mid-2000’s, but I always thought Rocky’s hair was a striking part of his look. Bald Dwayne is just another in a long line of hairless badass types, and it doesn’t have the flavor that he used to have.

Maybe that’s just me, though.

When I was recently perusing the streaming services for something to watch, I came across The Rundown (available on Peacock!), and something stirred within me and demanded to see slimmer The Rock with hair. So I started the flick.

The Rundown, to me, always got easily confused with another Rock vehicle, Walking Tall. They came out around the same time–about within a year of each other–and they each co-starred a future Duke Boy: Sean William Scott in The Rundown; Johnny Knoxville in Walking Tall. That’s a strange coincidence, I guess, and part of me hopes Rocky got their agents together to make The Dukes Of Hazard re-imagining happen.

In The Rundown, Rock stars as Beck, a mercenary who dreams of putting his hard-knock life behind him and opening a restaurant. After an opening segment where he takes down a college NCAA star quarterback who has racked up gambling debts, Beck makes a deal with his boss: he will grab the boss’ son and return him home in exchange for a big enough payday to leave this life behind.

The son, Travis, is played by Scott, in all his shit-eating-grinning glory. He is a college dropout in the Amazon looking for a gold statue and all the wealth and fame that will come with being the man who recovered it. Unfortunately, the land on which it likely resides seems to belong to a gold mine baron with a propensity for violence and exploitation of his workers.

When Beck gets to South America, the hunt for Travis is on. But even if he finds his target, will they be able to leave the jungle alive?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ I enjoy both some classic Rocky and some Sean William Scott, so I had a good enough time with this one. Each actor has plenty of charisma to spare and they earn their time on screen. On paper, it seems like a great pairing. However, they don’t really have great chemistry, honestly, and it feels like they are acting against each other rather than with one another. It’s hard to explain, but they each feel like they are trying to get their stuff in rather than blending together as a unit. But they are still fun and each get some noteworthy moments and lines. It just feels a bit like a missed opportunity to be even better.

+ In addition to our leads, we have Rosario Dawson as a rebel (a rebel with the whitest, cleanest teeth ever for living in a mining town) and Christopher Walken as the evil slave-driver antagonist. They each do solid work bringing their characters to life, too. In 2003, despite already having some SNL appearances under his belt, Walken wasn’t quite the parody of himself he would become, so he could still play a serious villain role. And Dawson was in the coming-into-her-own phase of her career and giving 110%.

– There is a story about Rock’s character not liking or using guns, but we never get a satisfactory backstory as to why. He just doesn’t like them, and that’s all there is to it. Until, of course, he has to use them in a foreshadowed moment of saving his newfound friend. It would be a better climax if we got a superior story on why he avoids guns to begin with, though. It’s kind of like a reverse Chekhov’s Gun, except it does not have a payoff.

If you just have the Beck character not use guns until he gets his hands on some late movie, nothing changes; you don’t need this fabricated dislike of them with no motivation. It’s like the screenwriters chose the path of most resistance to get to an irrelevant ending.

– The movie is a relatively hard PG-13 to maximize younger teen audiences who were fans of The Rock from WWE or Sean William Scott from the American Pie movies. Hard as it is for PG-13, it would be better as an R rated movie, though. We see people getting shot and killed, sure, but there is no blood. Now, would blood dramatically improve those scenes? No. But some more foul language could have really worked for Rocky and Stiffler to show their emotions during the action.

Speaking of action, there is a lot of it, and it’s all poorly edited in addition to being blood-free. I think, because they wanted the movie to believably be PG-13 and not have blood splatter, they edited these beats so quickly and haphazardly to make it all make sense. But what it did instead was make the moments look sloppy.

Also, the humor is some PG-13 goofy stuff that really doesn’t work. Rock and SWS both can work with parentally guided humor, but this just wasn’t cleverly written enough to maximize their talents. Which, again, I think some harsher language might have helped with. Or maybe it would have been as handled as badly as the humor we already got.

I think I just squeezed like three Downs into this PG-13 one. Oops! Sorry, The Rundown.

OVERALL

I went into The Rundown expecting a flick that would bottom out at Average. With this cast and their caliber and a decent premise, I thought I would be getting a fun time with two stars goofing off one another. Unfortunately, this was a big miss for me. The writing is just bad, and the direction doesn’t help it at all. Nothing really gels together for it, and I was ultimately shocked by how little fun I had.