In which the Rock finally exercises his Second Amendment rights.
They still apply overseas, because AMERICA.
It was a bit hard to write about this one, given that even though there’s fighting it’s not really “a fight”– so much generalized chaos that it’s a bit hard to boil down, more of an all-purpose action scene. But there’s enough blows thrown and clever choreography that I couldn’t ignore it in good conscience.
4) Beck vs All the Bad Guys
The Fighters:
- Beck, the would-be chef whose bounty hunting got him caught in the middle of a South American uprising. Played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
- Armed with: Beck is determined not to go in guns blazing, but he soon discovers the limits of that approach and makes Charlton Heston proud.
- Travis Walker, not one of the main players here but is featured just enough to warrant his inclusion. Spoiled and silly but also unpredictable, he does prove a bit useful here. Played by the always-welcome Seann William Scott.
- Armed with: Travis packs a gun right from the beginning. Also his pals Mr. Thunder and Mr. Lightning.
- Hatcher’s men, pretty much all the remaining ones– around 15-20. They’re posted strategically throughout the ramshackle little village. Including Cornelius Bernard Hatcher himself, hapless brother Harvey, and the awesome Swenson; played by Christopher Walken, Jon Gries and Stuart F. Wilson, respectively.
- Armed with: all sorts of guns, and of course Swenson brought whips, as did his two buddies.
The Setup: Beck, Travis and Mariana found the Gato earlier, but she, wanting to sell it so her people could be free of Hatcher, drugged the other two just to be safe and left them in the jungle. Unfortunately she ended up getting snatched by Hatcher’s men while they were separated, and Beck gets word that the bad guy’s holding her in the town square and will likely execute her soon. [Also, after the last fight, Beck made nice with the rebels but the proceedings were interrupted by a raid from Hatcher, who personally shot & killed Manito. Boo!]
Beck is free to take Travis and fly out of there, but the pair’s consciences can’t allow the distressed damsel to meet her fate. Off to settle Hatcher’s hash it is, then.
The Fight: Beck kicks things off on an odd note, by sending his Scottish pilot-for-hire Declan in, blowing on bagpipes, to trash talk at Hatcher using Biblical rhetoric. He presumably serves not as an omen but as a distraction, so that no one would hear the incoming stampede of bulls until it was too late.
Yep, bulls. A clever use of Chekov’s Gun, the presence of a nearby bovine herd had been set up early in the film. They rampage through the small town square, scattering (and in a few cases trampling) Hatcher’s men and tearing up structures. As the villain himself wryly remarks, “that’s a lotta cows.”
They also provide excellent cover for Beck to storm right into the midst of Hatcher’s men. He tears up several using his strength and creativity before they can take a shot at him– possibly my favorite bit is when he stomps the end of a loose floorboard to throw one bad guy’s aim off. He takes out a handful, depriving them all of weapons and even using their guns as clubs. Meanwhile Travis gets isolated in a small shop and has an epic length confrontation with one (1) squirrelly thug, who he eventually takes down rather humorously.
But eventually Beck’s non-projectile strategy reaches its limits, and with all the bulls having come through the bad guys have a clear line of sight on their adversaries. Both Beck and Travis are pinned down by sustained fire in separate locations, and there’s a long, desperate while Beck realizes he’s going to have to go his Bad Emotional Place and use guns again.
But once he does, it is on. The hero rises to triumphant guitar strings, bearing a shotgun in each hand, and engages Beast Mode as he strides across the battlefield and blasts down every henchmen in sight. Here I’ll defer to my gun nut readers’ expertise but I’m pretty sure many of the distances Beck is shooting from would be very hard to manage with a shotgun– a weapon hardly known for its precision from afar. Still, he looks cool doing it. Especially when he causes a leaky tanker truck to blow up and walks away from the fireball in slow-mo, as all action heroes have been required to do ever since the days of Mosaic law.
Out of bullets, Beck finds himself pinned down again across from a group of henchmen in a sniper’s nest, but no problem: the Rock simply leaps the distance between structures and starts punching out all the support pillars, bringing the whole rickety perch tumbling down.
His arm still smarting, Beck is confronted by Swenson and his two fetishist pals. Time to get kinky.
The three quickly surround Beck, and here Berg tries something ambitious, because it’s difficult enough to stage an inventive fight sequence (with a real sense of back & forth) involving a whip, and this fight has three whip-users. Four whips total, actually, because Swenson is dual-wielding.
It must have been a pain to block this fight out, but the result is a real blast. Beck gets knocked about and snapped at but still gives back pretty good as well. He manages to neutralize Swenson’s two cohorts simultaneously, seizing the guns from their belts while on the ground and firing after kicking them down. Why they (or Swenson, who also was shown to have a gun) did not just shoot Beck despite having ample opportunity, is not mentioned. It’s especially odd in light of Swenson’s own “you should have kept the gun” admonition to Beck during the bar fight scene.
After tangling a bit more with Swenson, Beck is able to disarm the knockoff Belmont and go hand-to-hand with him for a few rounds. And while I think Swenson’s tops as a henchmen, there’s no way their little scruff would even last this long if not for Beck being so visibly worn down during it. Hero finally subdues henchman, and Beck is nearly taken out by a lingering sniper, before that shooter is fortuitously shot by Travis. Beck grabs the man’s fallen gun and immediately blasts the pistol out of the hand of Hatcher, who’d been quietly approaching and nearly taken out Beck from behind.
From there, it all winds down. Walken gets a few more hammy lines as the character refuses to contemplate how he’s lost everything, and is ultimately shot by an anonymous villager. Oh, and Travis subdued Harvey by crashing his escaping car into a water tower.
Do you know what this fight is? It’s a video game. It’s SO a video game. Especially after Beck arms himself– just put the camera into first-person view and his unstoppable rampage will be a lot more familiar. I say this with affection, obviously.
A few demerits, however. Aside from the aforementioned Gun Accuracy Fails and Swenson’s men choosing to get suicidally physical, the big one is Beck’s own decision go all NRA Poster Boy. It works quite well as a badass hero moment, but there’s literally no payoff to Beck’s earlier reticence to use guns. He doesn’t seem to be any more bloodthirsty than usual (certainly no more than the situation requires) and has no trouble dialing himself back down once the danger has passed. Nobody has to talk him off the ledge. He even gives Hatcher multiple chances to walk away alive! There’s no emotional consequence for the character, or even the illusion of same. Of course, this is a self-consciously silly movie, but it still oughtn’t introduce “serious” character beats it has no intention of following through on.
But the action is still fast, creative and continuous. It may not be as outright fun and inventive as the big jungle throwdown, but the scale and intensity is ratcheted up to appropriate levels for the climax. Just a good ol’ fashioned ass-whoopin’ writ large. This is the Rock’s destiny.
I demand sequels. Or at least Peter Berg signed on for a Castlevania adaptation.
Grade: B+
Coming Attractions: I have a good feeling about this.
Tagged: guns, melee, The Rock, The Rundown
