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| Walking Tall |
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  (6/10)
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Runtime: 86 m |
| Public Rating: 7.70 (98 votes) |
Director: Kevin Bray |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Action |
Year: 2004 |
| Writer(s): David Klass, Channing Gibson, David Levien, Brian Koppelman |
| Distributor: MGM |
| Reviewed by: Mark Chua |
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One man will stand up for what’s right
Chris Vaughn (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) has returned home to his small town after his tour of duty in the United States Armed Forces. He returns home to find the lumber mill that his father used to work at closed and the town in a general state of disarray, thanks to the new major source of revenue - a casino owned by Jay Hamilton, Jr. (Neal McDonough), who also happens to be Vaughn’s high school rival. When Chris’ nephew Pete (Khleo Thomas) is sold some Crystal Meth by the casino security guards, Chris vows to run for sheriff and clean up the town. With his best friend Ray Templeton (Johnny Knoxville), they set out to go after the town’s biggest problem: the casino and its owner.
The Rock, dubbed by many as “the next great action star”, is his usual charismatic self. He has that natural screen presence, one that commands your attention when he’s on camera. Like Stallone and Schwarzenegger before him, he has that aura about him where you can’t help but watch. He relied on that very heavily in “The Mummy Returns” and in “Scorpion King”, and now his acting ability is beginning to catch up to his natural charisma. When you consider he’s playing a guy who just bashes people with a giant piece of wood, he fleshed out that character with remarkable subtlety and depth. He wasn’t a walking one-liner and not all of his lines required a dramatic pause before they came out. Even when delivering lines that ooze so much cheese it makes you cringe, he’s able to play it off so that it’s just cheesy, and not laughably bad. He did his best to play a normal guy who just wanted a normal life and for the most part, he was successful in conveying that. One thing that The Rock does have over his predecessors and his new-found rival in Vin Diesel is an uncanny sense of comedic timing. A facial expression here, a quick, subtle pause there, and he turns a forgettable moment into something you can laugh at, but more importantly, talk about on your way out of the theatre.
Johnny Knoxville, who I last saw dive-bombing a golf cart and almost breaking his neck in “Jackass”, was surprisingly good as both The Rock’s deputy and the movie’s comic relief. Knoxville and The Rock exhibit a strong chemistry with each other, and you truly believe that they are life-long best friends. He plays the lovable loser perfectly, and can make you laugh at him and feel for him at the exact same time. Neal McDonough, who plays antagonist Jay Hamilton, Jr., played his part with a natural arrogance that made it easy to hate his character. He tried valiantly to make Hamilton believable, but when you’re playing a guy who inherits money (thus not earning his fortune), shuts down the lifeblood of a small town, opens up a house of gambling (a dirty one at that), cheats in pickup football games, AND sells drugs to children, there’s not much you can do to give your character substance. The only things that were missing were the pitchfork, horns and 70’s-era porn mustache, although those three wouldn’t make him any less subtle. Outside of the stupidly sexy Ashley Scott, the rest of the supporting cast was entirely forgettable, maybe even sub-par, as the acting was on the same level as a bad made-for-TV movie.
Therein lies one of the biggest problems of the movie: you didn’t know if you were watching a big-budget action thriller or the Sunday Night NBC special. There is some real shoddy and awkward camera work, where the camera jitters so badly that it’s distracting. This is especially evident in many of the fast-paced scenes like the football game and fight scenes, but the fact that it also happens in very simple scenes, including ones where The Rock is just driving around, is absolutely unforgivable. In the age of epic battles and gravity-defying crane kicks, it would have been a nice change of pace to just see someone get punched in the face. This had the potential to fill that void, but unfortunately Kevin Bray drops the ball because the action scenes were either poorly shot or lazily edited. In this case, it was probably both.
Walking Tall, which is a re-make of a 1973 movie that was based on a true story, doesn’t exactly tread new ground in the world of cinema. There have been countless movies about one man and his fight to clean up his town. It’s a simple premise that works – most of the time. Unfortunately, in Walking Tall we have a movie that was so unbelievably predictable that you knew what was happening every step of the way, before any of the characters looked like they even had a clue. For movies like this, where you pretty much know how the story will end, it’s all about the journey, and how our hero cleans up the town, and Walking Tall fails to capture the audience’s attention with formulaic problems solved predictably by Vaughn’s four-by-four.
The movie has been largely promoted as “The Rock in Walking Tall”, and as such, you shouldn’t expect much more. Bad characterization, shoddy camera work, poor direction and an extremely predictable plot put The Rock behind the eight-ball. In fact, it’s a movie that speaks volumes about The Rock’s ability as an actor. The fact that he can pull this potential nightmare of a movie into respectability shows me that with the right movie, The Rock is ready to be the next one. In fact, after seeing this, I’m certain that he isn’t the “next” great action star, he is THE action star of this generation.
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 Printable Version
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Chris Vaughn - Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson
Jay Hamilton, Jr. - Neal McDonough
Ray Templeton - Johnny Knoxville
Deni - Ashley Scott
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