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The Rock has bite as 'The Scorpion King'
Kelly Hu and The Rock in 'The Scorpion King'
Universal Pictures
He's celebrated as "a record-setting six-time champion of the World Wrestling Federation before he entered the demanding realm of film acting."
Wouldn't it be more impressive to win it once and keep it?
Anyway, I'm just quoting the press notes for "The Scorpion King," in which The Rock portrays Mathayus, The Scorpion King, a character he first played in last year's "The Mummy Returns."
But wait. Why would Johnson prefer to be billed as The Rock? After all, if he gets an Oscar for this, which is less likely than Herbert Hoover winning it in absentia, and if he reaches for loftier material, will he really want to be billed as The Rock in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" or The Rock in "Stones in His Pocket"?
The answer might lurk in the credits for "The Scorpion King," which list as executive producer Vince McMahon, board chairman of World Wrestling Federation Entertainment.
As a performer, The Rock has considerably less personality than Pittsburgh pro grapplers such as Bruno Sammartino, Johnny DeFazio, Frank Holtz, Larry Zbyszko and Kurt Angle.
On the other hand, as an actor, The Rock is infinitely more dexterous than McMahon.
According to the screenplay by Stephen Sommers, Will Osborne and David Hayter, Mathayus was an Akkadian assassin 5,000 years ago, which is not only way cool but pre-Internet.
Mathayus rallied several nomadic tribes to resist the treachery of Memnon, a nasty chap but a role entrusted to a much savvier actor, Steven Brand.
Memnon rules from Gomorrah — as in "Sodom and …" — and is influenced by Cassandra the sorceress (Kelly Hu). Her magical powers, as she knows, may be muted by her libido. You got it: Sex could be perilous to her job security.
She's quite cozy with Memnon until she gets a load of the WWF lineup, which includes the mammoth Balthazar (Michael Clarke Duncan), the kindly scientist Philos (Bernard Hill) and the comic relief horse thief Arpid (Grant Heslov).
The plot rules are simple: The greatest warrior gets to be king, which sounds like a Parker Brothers game without strategy.
Having grown up with movies that wooed kids with advertising lines such as "SEE the four deadly cobras!," "SEE the venom of scurrying scorpions!" and "SEE the mighty Mathayus buried up to his neck near rampaging red ants!," I would have queued up back then for "The Scorpion King" with a quarter in my tight little fist before you could say, "Golly! Red ants, too?"
"The Scorpion King" has them all but throws them away out of sheer inefficiency and misplaced emphasis. The film lacks the delicious, eye-widening imagination of "The Naked Jungle" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Director Chuck Russell ("Eraser," "Bless the Child") settles for the more routine action sequences you can find in any number of other movies.
All of them are sabotaged by the true bad guys of movies, Incoherent Staging and Dizzy Editing, who reduce the comprehension of fights and battles to guesswork and rumor.
Know what, though? For all of its modest humor (very modest), including colloquial dialogue ("Not a problem") and disposable contemporary delivery, "The Scorpion King" sprints to a welcome finish in 90 minutes with a majestic score by John Debney and a surprisingly ingratiating way about it.
Let's just not get crazy by encouraging them to turn it into a franchise.
| 'The Scorpion King' |
Director: Chuck Russell
Stars: The Rock (Dwayne Johnson), Steven Brand, Michael Clarke Duncan
MPAA Rating: PG-13, for intense sequences of action violence and some sensuality
