MY MOVIE SHELF: The Rundown

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 208  Days to go: 145

Movie #230:  The Rundown

My husband has had The Rundown since I’ve known him, and I thought I’d managed to put off seeing it until now. Turns out I’ve totally seen it, only it’s not the one where The Rock comes back to his hometown to kick some ass or whatever. It’s the other The Rock movie.

The Rundown is an odd film, like if the screenplay was written using Mad Libs. For example:

Former Wrestler-Turned-Actor’s Name: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Male Singer with only one name: Beck. Euphemism for bounty hunter: Retrieval Expert. Spastic yet kind of funny/handsome/charming actor: Seann William Scott. Tropical location: Amazon rainforest. Legitimate crazy person actor: Christopher Walken. Spanish word for an animal: Gato. Common Weapon (plural): Guns. Atypical Weapon: Whip. Jungle Animal (plural): Monkeys. Sexy yet badass vaguely “ethnic” chick: Rosario Dawson.

And the final result:

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson stars as Beck, a Retrieval Expert hired to bring back his boss’s son Travis (Seann William Scott) from the Amazon rainforest. Travis is in debt to a man named Hatcher (Christopher Walken), who rules the village with an iron fist, enslaving the locals through force and violence. Beck purchases Travis from Hatcher, but Hatcher reneges on the deal, when he discovers Travis has found the mythical ancient treasure of El Gato, a golden statue worth millions. Beck fights Hatcher’s men, though he refuses to use guns. There is an elaborately choreographed fight scene, which culminates in Beck fighting off a man with a whip. Beck escapes with Travis but they get lost in the jungle, humped by monkeys and are in trouble with the local rebels until it’s revealed that sexy bartender Mariana (Rosario Dawson) is the rebel leader. She strikes a deal to help them out of the jungle if Travis will lead her to El Gato. He does so, but she runs off with it for reasons, probably, before getting caught by Hatcher. Beck has to return to the village to save Mariana, retrieve El Gato, and free the villagers. He has a fierce fight — including a huge brawl with three men with whips — but eventually has to use guns even though he hates them. With Hatcher defeated, Beck and Travis return to the U.S. for Beck to earn his bounty, before paralyzing his boss and allowing Travis to escape. The End.

So, yeah. It’s pretty dumb and extremely thin and there’s just not much to recommend it except for the fact that all these actors are clearly having a lot of fun with their ridiculous roles (except maybe Dawson, who seems a little disappointed). They put on a goofy show, make a lot of dumb jokes, and get you in and out in under two hours no worse for wear. I’ve endured worse evenings than this, is what I’m saying. And I really like The Rock, in spite of myself.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Be Cool

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #25: Be Cool

I’ve never seen this movie before (it’s my husband’s), though I have seen Get Shorty once, which Be Cool is the sequel to (watching them out of order because that’s what happens when you don’t give your sequels alphabetically-later titles). So I find myself spending a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on in 2005, when this movie came out. I feel like maybe The Pussycat Dolls were a thing? This movie makes me feel like it’s referencing the time when people were trying to make Nicole Scherzinger a thing — like, a solo thing. I could be wrong. Maybe The Pussycat Dolls were later.

Anyway, this movie, like its predecessor, is satirizing a lot of things: gangster stereotypes, the movie business, the music business, girl groups, rap groups, etc. It really crams a lot in there. Unfortunately, it only feels like maybe half the people working on it were aware it was a comedy. I’m unsure at this moment whether the writer of the screenplay was one of those people. Elmore Leonard wrote the novel, of course, and I really dig his stuff — as will be immediately apparent when we get to the undervalued masterpiece Out of Sight — but some of his slickness and ease with the written word and with the worlds of hoodlums and wannabes seems to have been lost in the translation of this one. Get Shorty was revered in its way — Hollywood loves a good inside joke, which was all Get Shorty was, really, one big mock-up of Hollywood insiders — but despite its overtly meta jokes, Be Cool falls a little short of that insider-y vibe. It feels a bit slapped together, sloppy, loose around the hinges.

There’s also the problem of its jokes not aging that well, what with T-Mobile Sidekicks, dusty caricatures of both black men and white men who “act like” black men, and some cringe-inducing attempts at gay-bashing humor, but if you can tune some of that stuff out, it’s really not all that bad as far as lightweight comedies go. The attempts to go meta land fairly well, and whoever costumed Uma Thurman was just goofy enough to put her in cutesy t-shirts advertising her newly widowed status. Plus, Andre 3000 (Andre Benjamin) is really kind of delightful as the awkward and clumsy rapper Dabu, and The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) is often downright hilarious.

The entire plot, concerning Christina Milian’s character Linda Moon, is tortured, it’s true, but without it how could they have shoehorned Steven Tyler’s terrible acting into the mix? And really, I would watch this movie just to see the late Anna Nicole Smith make out with Danny DeVito on the Kiss Cam at a Lakers game. Not even kidding.