Text size:

The Rundown

Rock and Role: He's Swingin' in the Rain (Forest)

By Jan Stuart | STAFF WRITER

September 26, 2003

(PG-13). The Rock, dapper and good-humored, survives the daunting jungles of Brazil with wisenheimer Seann William Scott. No-brainer, all-brawny action comedy with a surprising display of visual dynamism from actor-turned-director Peter Berg. With Christopher Walken, Rosario Dawson. 1:44 (adventure, violence and some crude dialogue). At area theaters.

Heaven only knows how vexing (and profitable) it must be for a super-extraordinary athlete of color to have to baby-sit a cocky white surfer dude whose primary talent is his ability to disarm moonstruck 14-year-old girls with his roguish smile. Heaven, and Jackie Chan, who was so patient and resilient at keeping Owen Wilson from harm's way in "Shanghai Noon," that he got to do it again in "Shanghai Knights."

Now, The Rock gets his au pair moment, playing a muscle-popping Mary Poppins to Seann William Scott's overgrown Dennis the Menace in "The Rundown." Instead of a park in London, they chase around the jungles of Brazil, picnicking on organic hallucinogens and getting on each other's nerves. Expect the opening weekend box office to be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Don't expect new horizons in the annals of odd-couple, comedy-action flicks.

In a role tailored to The Rock's knockabout elegance, the former Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment champ plays Beck, a self-styled "retrieval expert." That's a fancy way of saying he fetches, for a fee, objects and people that would ordinarily require the collective defensive capabilities of the Green Berets. Ultimately, Beck would like to open a gourmet restaurant - he's always sniffing about for the perfect porcini mushroom recipe - but for now, he has to content himself with taking down the entire offensive line of a pro-football team to get back a ring.

His latest assignment whisks him off to the Brazilian rain forests (in reality, Hawaii with a South American tropics makeover), where he is on a mission to bag a millionaire's rambunctious son. Travis, his target (Scott, the wily Stifler of the "American Pie" films), has brought his propensity for trouble to his new jungle hideaway, where he is in hot water with a vicious mining magnate who enslaves the impoverished locals. This neo-Simon Legree, Hatcher, is played by Christopher Walken, who wears a broad-brimmed Orson Welles hat, a la "Touch of Evil," and can do these smarmy despot characters as handily in his sleep as Welles did at high noon.

Travis, spunky monkey that he is, will not go gently into daddy's arms without a fight. So, Travis drags Beck on a combative tear through the jungle, pursued by Hatcher and his whip-snapping henchmen. Poking in and out of the blade is an incomprehensible Scottish chatterbox named Declan (Ewen Bremner) and an Obligatory Romantic Interest named Mariana (Rosario Dawson), a Brazilian freedom fighter with a suspiciously material interest in rare, ceremonial objets d'art.

Beck and Travis get into lots of scrapes that involve nasty marsupials, animal traps and trippy jungle edibles that twist and stretch one's body, fun- house-mirror style. It was dumb when Bud Abbott and Lou Costello did this stuff, and it's dumb now. To his everlasting credit, though, Abbott did not subject a handcuffed Costello to further humiliations when his bladder was fit to burst, as The Rock does to Scott here. If the idea of that rocks your funny bone, "The Rundown" will fracture you.

As titles go, "The Rundown" is as cool as they come. But I don't know what it means. No one in the picture looks run down, gets run down or receives a rundown. Nevertheless, it should easily accommodate a clone sequel, "The Rerundown," in which The Rock opens a four-star restaurant in Kirkush after single-handedly foiling a thousand Saddam Hussein loyalists and a bevy of insurgents from "Iron Chef."