Release Date: April 2, 2004
Starring: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Neal McDonough, Johnny Knoxville, John Beasley, Ashley Scott, Michael Bowen
Directed by: Kevin Bray
Written by: David Klass, Channing Gibson, David Levien, Brian Koppelman
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sequences of intense violence, sexual content, drug material, language)
We can all agree that action movies require little thought, both for those making them and for those watching them. Walking Tall, the pseudo-remake of a 1973 film of the same name, doesn’t break with tradition. In fact, there’s probably more substance in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s left arm than there is in this shallow and disappointingly brief actioner. It hints at the fun of 2003’s similarly straightforward (but still entertaining) The Rundown, but at a brisk and unsatisfying 75 minutes there’s hardly a chance to get our fill of guilty pleasure from Walking Tall, much less for the movie to grow a brain.
The first things on screen are the words “Inspired by a true story,” which could either mean what we’re watching happened in real life, more or less, or that the screenwriters took maybe a character and a place name and fabricated everything else. By looking at the list of writers for the film (there are nearly enough to start a basketball game), it’s fairly obvious Walking Tall is more fictional than fact-based. Yet even after presumably taking generous liberties, none of the writers managed to transform the story into a well-balanced action flick.
The movie is dedicated to Buford Pusser, the man who inspired it and the original film, after he became the sheriff of a small Washington town in order to rid it of corruption. The Rock plays the Pusser-based character, who has just returned from serving in the Army’s Special Forces to find his hometown plagued by drugs, gambling, and crooked law enforcement. Disgusted and enraged, he decides to wage a one-man battle against a former friend, played by Neal McDonough, the owner of the local casino and principal cause of the town’s downfall. Things don’t go well for our hero, however, and his initial brush with danger leaves him seriously hospitalized.
In a laughably brief and ineffective courtroom scene, he’s found innocent of trashing the casino (and its goony employees) and announces in his closing statement that he will run for county sheriff. The local residents love his courage and his desire to change things back to the way they were, so he wins the election and is then free to set out on a mission to bring down the casino and the drug ring that operates inside of it. The rest is your typical revenge movie rigmarole.
Some of it is actually rather fresh, especially with the inclusion of comedic actor Johnny Knoxville as The Rock’s friend and eventual deputy. In an amusing scene, they gang up together on one thug and sadistically destroy his truck. And in another scene toward the end, Knoxville happens to blast a bad guy with his shotgun; with the twang of the actor’s characteristic theme music in the background, he stands over the crook and says, “Are you hurt, man?”
The Rock, too, isn’t all that bad. As an action star, he’s more charismatic and far more built than his contemporary Vin Diesel, who is also doing his best to follow in the footsteps of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though the shallowness of Walking Tall doesn’t quite flatter him, The Rock still shows a good deal of potential as Schwarzenegger’s heir apparent. The scene in which he tears apart the casino, as well as a few of the villains inside, is the stuff that good action flicks are made of. And when he smashes in the tail light of his enemy’s Porsche (in a moment that The Rock reportedly improvised), you’ll wish he had more than just the garbage of this small town to clean up.
In fact, the biggest problem with the movie, overall, is that there’s not enough of it. The story goes from introduction, to conflict, to resolution in a terribly short amount of time -- so short it might feel like the distributor forgot to include a reel of film, like the one where The Rock and his partner confront and arrest more of the bad guys. The way it is, the heroes go straight from becoming the newly inducted law enforcement officers to solving the ordeal in less than a half hour. There isn’t even a taste of falling action, and if you get up to go to bathroom at any point, you might as well have stayed home and watched the HBO behind-the-scenes special. Then again, maybe the incident involving Bufford Pusser was just as short-lived. But if it was, there wouldn’t be much of a reason to make a movie (or two) of it in the first place.
-- Andy Zientek (zfilm@earthlink.net)