Salon.com > Dwayne Johnson

Pick of the week: Michael Bay’s self-mocking crime farce

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

With his pumped-up and violent crime farce “Pain & Gain” – a thoroughly reprehensible and frequently hilarious satire that depicts American life as a circus of stupidity, artificiality and self-regard -- Michael Bay sends a clear message to those of us who’ve been making fun of him: He’s been in on the joke the whole time. I can think of a variety of responses to this, but they all basically boil down to “Yeah, so what else is new?”

There has always been a powerful current of self-mockery, or at least self-awareness, in Bay’s ludicrous “Transformers” movies, which embraced bigness, loudness, dumbness, visual incoherence and cartoonish female pulchritude (see: Fox, Megan, entire career of) as central formal elements and stylistic first principles. I wasn’t the only critic to observe that Bay’s enormous 2011 hit, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” had elements of avant-garde surrealism and elements of high camp, and could be described as a “performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment.”

“Fast Five” and the new action-movie brutality

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 21:30:00 +0000

There are various reasons to root for "Fast Five," an adrenalized, hip-hop-fueled action sequel that gets the summer movie season off to an early, roaring start this weekend. As mind-numbing urban-destruction movies go, it's carefully crafted and gorgeously photographed, with plenty of pumped-up bodies, juiced-up cars, Rio de Janeiro scenery and chase sequences of byzantine complexity and unremitting intensity.

When director Justin Lin and screenwriter Chris Morgan took over the fading street-racing franchise with its 2006 third installment, "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" (basically an offshoot that dumped the original cast), it seemed at first like a classic Hollywood attempt to pander to minority audiences with a second-rate product. But that movie performed well enough that Lin was given a crack at rebooting the franchise with "Fast & Furious" in 2009, a huge hit that reunited original stars Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez (and outdid the original 2001 "Fast and the Furious" at the box office). "Fast Five" subtracts Rodriguez but brings back Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Tyrese Gibson, Gal Gadot and Sung Kang for an "Ocean's"-type heist flick that pits the street racers against a Brazilian crime lord and a massively ripped federal agent, played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson with a Mephistophelean beard and a bunch of snappy one-liners.

“The Other Guys”: A late-summer cop-comedy surprise

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:20:00 +0000

For its first few minutes, the new cop comedy "The Other Guys" seems like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie mainlining a blend of crystal meth and Colt 45. It features Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as a pair of macho, swaggering supercops who kick ass and destroy property. They take down a drug gang by driving a New York tour bus -- with a vintage Chevelle muscle car jammed through it sideways -- into a glass-fronted Manhattan building, causing one of those massive fireballs from which action stars always emerge unscathed.

At the ensuing press conference on the steps of City Hall, a gushing reporter asks Danson (Johnson), "Are the rumors about you and Kim Kardashian true?" Doing his best smooth-operator Barack Obama impression, Johnson responds, "No comment -- but yes!", cracking everybody up. You might barely notice the movie's first surprise, when another reporter asks the duo whether it was worth causing all that mayhem and destruction to arrest a carload of Rastafarians holding a quarter-pound of pot. (They blow it off: "We'll let New York City decide that! Greatest city in the world, yo!") You'll definitely notice the second one, when, let's just say, Danson and his partner Highsmith (Jackson) make an unexpected exit from the film, leaving room for a new pair of NYPD alpha dogs.

Dwayne Johnson: He still rocks my world

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:20:00 +0000

Few actors are as big — as broad and as muscular, and as physically sturdy — as Dwayne Johnson, the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment champion formerly known as The Rock. But plumbing the appeal of Dwayne Johnson the actor requires setting the size of the package aside for a moment, the better to zero in on subtleties: The expressiveness of those unnaturally mobile eyebrows or the way, either in character or during the course of an on-camera interview, he almost seems to blush when he makes a self-deprecating joke, as if he were wary of calling too much attention to himself. Johnson is so good-natured that even when he's not wearing a smile, his facial muscles carry the ghost of one. Maybe that's part of his charm as a performer: For such a big lug of a guy, his star quality is of the quiet sort. No wonder Hollywood doesn't know quite what to do with him. Until recently, at least, that wasn't the worst thing. Since his film debut, in Stephen Sommers' 2001 "The Mummy Returns," Johnson has starred in a badly received remake of "Walking Tall" (2004), played an ostentatiously gay bodyguard (unfortunately saddled with stale gay stereotype jokes) in F. Gary Gray's Elmore Leonard adaptation "Be Cool" (2005), and provided the voice of a cartoon space explorer in "Planet 51" (2009). Those weren't star-making roles, or ones that increased any star-power momentum he'd already built.