Worst Actors - Pauly Shore

Pauly Shore.. Being manly
Source: huffpost.com

There are few actors in history that have been so deservedly and universally-hated as Pauly Shore.  Born the child of a showbiz family, Shore started in stand-up comedy in the 80's.  He is mostly known by his persona, a parody of a valley kid from California he dubbed "the Weasel".  It is this character that would define him in the eyes of millions for the rest of his career.  

Shore's first big break came in the late 80's in the form of an MTV VJ gig.  His run on the network would continue until 1994.  In the meantime, Shore would star in five major roles that are now legendary as some of the worst performances of the 90's.  Many called him grating and unfunny, and as films have shown us in the past, just because your standup comedy is funny (Shore’s wasn’t, by the way), this does not necessarily  make you an actor.  This was exasperated by Shore’s use of his Weasel character in almost all of his film roles, likely due to studio pressure as this is how he is known by the public.

Still, like any Hollywood actor, Shore’s beginnings were humble.  It would take him a few years to start draining the life of audiences.  His first major movie was a small part the 1988 comedy/drama For Keeps.  The film was at a point of career-decline for the once-sensational Molly Ringwald and was really not a good movie.  It has been long-forgotten and was a forced, bland story of a two teenagers who pass up on college in favor of raising a kid, who the girl Darcy (Ringwald) conceived accidentally.  It had all the tone and production quality of a made-for-TV after-school special but was actually a major movie brought to us by the director of Rocky!

That same year Pauly Shore was in the long-forgotten George Burns comedy 18 Again!, a one-in-a-million body-swap comedy about an elderly man who gets a second shot at youth in the form of his grandson.  18 Again! was not a good movie.  It was yet another uninspired retread of the Freaky Friday plot done poorly.  Shore’s character was small and left no impact on the audience, despite him being audacious and annoying in his scenes.

He continued to act in awful messes into the 90’s but never really got top-billing.  Meanwhile, he was increasing in popularity on MTV, and as a result, he was rewarded with a more major part in a Hollywood movie was the first major release for director Les Mayfield, a sparsely-working director and producer who would go on to direct such dreadful films as the Miracle on 34th Street remake, Flubber, the Man, and Code Name: the Cleaner.  Encino Man, released in 1992, was an awful comedy about a caveman (played by Brenden Fraser), thawed out in modern day Southern California.  It’s a little like Eegah! only instead of exposition in a cave, we get Fraser grunting and acting like an ass around Venice Beach all the while being exploited by two teenagers (played by Sean Astin and Pauly Shore).  Shore’s move to the foreground, as the character Stoney, was not a welcome change.  The movie had some success at the box office but was ultimately met with universally-negative opinions from critics and fans alike.  Still, the film’s production company, Hollywood Pictures, was not done milking Shore for all he was worth.  

Shore’s next major role came the very next year in 1993 in the comedy Son-In-Law.  The film was instantly hated by most, but has been defended by some as Pauly Shore’s “best” film.  This is not saying much, mind you, but Shore is given a little more to do acting-wise Still, he squanders his potential to strut his stuff in favor of predictable fish-out-of-water schtick and lazy, forced melodrama.  The plot of the film is a pretty typical one: Rebecca (Carla Gugino) is a country-gal who goes to a major college in California where she befriends a neanderthal named Crawl.  Crawl’s behavior is somewhat bizarre but Rebecca begins to trust him.  After finding he will be spending Thanksgiving vacation alone, she invites him home with her to meet her family.  In a very contrived incident in which Rebecca is trying to stall being proposed to by her longtime boyfriend, Crawl interrupts a town celebration to falsely announce her previous engagement to him.  Now the two must keep the ruse up for the duration of the holiday.

Son-In-Law’s typical, uninspired premise was a beacon of warning to anyone who would want to see any future films starring the bizarre performer.  It was an announcement of sorts: that Shore will only star in contrived, cookie-cutter, by-the-numbers plots stolen directly from significantly-better films.  This would become even more obvious in 1994 when Shore would star alongside the equally annoying Andy Dick in the military comedy In the Army Now.  

And... Now you're blind.  You're welcome.
Source: last.fm

In the Army Now is a very basic war comedy in which two slackers named Bones and Jack (take a while guess which one was played by Shore) join the military on a whim to take advantage of an enlistment bonus.  The result has half the film slogging through overused basic-training cliches followed by another thirty minutes of Shore, Dick, the ear-bleeding Lori Petty and the generally-unfunny David Alan Grier parked in some American sand dunes (which we are supposed to believe are in the Sahara Desert) next to a truck arguing with each other.  It is a grating movie from start-to-finish, made worse by the fact that every actor shouts, screams and squeals half their lines, as though these four performers were not already annoying enough as it is without their vocal contortions.

In the Army Now was actually more of a trend-setter than a cash-in, and I want to make a brief aside on the controversial subject of war comedies.  The 90’s saw a large quantity of high-profile military comedies starring washed-up former-A-listers that started roughly around the time In the Army Now was released.  Renaissance Man was released the same year, it bombed, and was followed up by a number of shallow remakes of classic military movies like Mchale’s Navy and and spoofs like Down Periscope and Sgt. Bilko.  This comic sun-genre was likely relaunched due to the critical and financial successes of such movies as Born on the Fourth of July (1989), A Few Good Men (1992), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Casualties of War (1989) and Full Metal Jacket (1987).  This influx in the popularity of war movies was also accelerated by the Gulf War, which ran from roughly 1989 to 1991 in multiple engagements and iterations.  Time has shown that a movie about an ongoing conflict, such as World War II, the Vietnam War, or the current military encroachments in the Middle East, have a degree of success due to interest in the subject by the public at large.  However, many movies on the subject of war released during said war are often not well-received in retrospect.  The extreme polarization in the country during Vietnam had a percentage of the population interested in movies with strong anti-war messages like the Deer Hunter as the wars they depicted were widely unpopular, so they tended to go over well with those that did not support the engagement in the first place

The military comedy, on the other hand, has had a rougher history.  Often following on the success of a major war movie, these films are usually poorly-received by audiences, with the exceptions of some high-quality examples like M.A.S.H. or Kelly’s Heroes.  As a rule, they tend to follow only a few paths plot-wise, and rarely attempt to do anything particularly clever or original.  They also tend to suffer in the budget department as the anti-war sentiment that is strong in Hollywood rarely sees war as a laughing matter, and often rejects or cuts down on the budget of pitched movies in the genre.  This is, unless there is an offer for the film to be picked up by a well-known director or producer with connections, as was the case with Barry Levinson and Good Morning Vietnam.  In the Army Now did not do this genre any favors with its weak premise, obvious budget limitations, cheap sets and all-around poor acting.

Through his run with Hollywood Pictures (Encino Man, Son-In-Law, In the Army Now), Shore had pretty much proven that he is not able to draw a crowd.  His over-the-top acting, crazed self-caricature and cheap, uninspired movies left producers and audiences cold, and he did not return to Hollywood Pictures.  His next major project began shortly after his departure from MTV, during the network’s mid-90’s format shift towards more original programming and less music-centered entertainment.  His leaving could also be attributed partly to the sudden and rapid collapse of Shore’s popularity as a performer.  Jury Duty was released in 1995 to widespread derision.  

The film was a send up of the 1957 Sidney Lumet classic 12 Angry Men, in which Shore plays Tommy (A normal name?! Well… Shit!), a schemer who is called in for jury duty (That's the TITLE!) just as he loses his job.  Tommy manipulates his way into a luxury hotel and, enjoying the taxpayer-funded board in the five-star establishment, he does everything he can to keep the trial going for as long as possible until he is ultimately found out.  The movie could have worked, to be completely honest.  It did not work, however, due mainly to the middle-school-level screenplay and dreadful performances by Shore, Tia Carrere and other supporting cast members like character actor Brian Doyle-Murray and the usually-excellent Stanley Tucci.  The talent in this movie, like the aforementioned Doyle-Murray and Tucci, as well as Abe Vigoda and Charles Napier are just phoning it in.  They really do not give a crap, and they don’t care who knows it.

At this point, Pauly Shore was pretty much washed up and he took the next bit of work that came along.  Unfortunately for everyone, that next bit of work was the notoriously-bad Bio-Dome.  Every few years a movie so bad comes out and just blows everyone’s minds.   The idea that someone, somewhere, with deep pockets and (one would think) some business sense, would green-light something this atrocious, this brainless, this soulless…  It’s just maddening.  To Bio-Dome’s credit, I am certain that there was no attempt to make a good movie here, so at least it knows it is a piece of garbage.  That is more than I can say for most of Adam Sandler’s movies.  Still, there is something to be said about a movie this bad.  It is just… astounding.

Bio-Dome follows two slackers named Bud and Doyle who revel in self-referential homophobia and thinly-veiled, but still very PG-13, misogyny.  The two man-children attempt to escape the reach of their environmentalist girlfriends, who are both trying to get their men to stand up and take part in saving the planet (Environmentalism is the key message of the movie, by the way.  Yeah!  This movie has the BALLS to have a freaking message!  UGH!).  During an outing, they pass an experiment in which five scientists are to be locked in a self-contained environmentally-pure, terrarium for one year.  The two idiots, mistaking the glass structure for a mall, sneak inside (despite obvious heavy-security, they get right inside with a simple distraction).  Now, because this movie was obviously written by mentally-defective fifth-graders, the two jackasses cannot simply be let out, and the experiment be reset.  No, they have to stay inside with the other five scientists for one full year.  Intensely-unfunny antics ensue.  

Bio-Dome is not just a bad movie.  No, it is a legend among bad movies, and film fans have considered it one of the absolute worst comedies of all time.  The extremely-low $15 million-dollar budget was made back, with profit, but this film ultimately killed Pauly Shore’s career, seemingly permanently.  Though he did not stop acting, his top-billed performances in major studio films came to an end.  Critics hated Bio-Dome with a passion, classifying it as one of the worst movies of all time.  The film holds an impressive 5% on Rotten Tomatoes and an even more-proper 1% on Metacritic, cementing Bio-Dome as a monument to bad filmmaking.  

So, what has Shore been doing since Bio-Doom?  He’s appeared in a few smaller films that I have not seen and made a number of guest voice-appearances on various popular TV shows like King of the Hill and Futurama.  His next lead role since the new Millenium was in a mockumentary entitled Pauly Shore is Dead, in which he picks fun of his own failed career.  I did not see the movie because I honestly did not want to waste my time.  Some people did apparently enjoy it, but for the most part it remained under the radar.  He starred in another mockumentary in 2009 called Adopted, where he plays himself traveling to Africa to adopt some kids.  Many of those that claimed to like Pauly Shore is Dead admittedly hated Adopted, calling it offensive.  The film, which was an obvious send-up of celebrity charity, failed to draw an audience, and like, his previous comedy doc, it just sort of came and went.  Shore continued to act in generally-awful movies and small roles in crap like his second attempt at a body-swap comedy in Opposite Day, in which all adults and kids all swap bodies.  It’s zany!  I watched the first few minutes with the full intention of writing a scathing review for it on this blog some time ago, but I could not get past the utterly dreadful theme song that plays over the opening credits, followed by the truly annoying child actors.  

Pauly Shore has continued through the years, doing standup and appearing in roles where he can get them.  Still, at this point Shore is pretty much audience-repellent.  His last major movie was the absolutely abhorrent Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star, in which he had a very minor part, and if you want an idea of how bad this movie is, I’ll just say that Shore is nowhere near the worst thing about it.

Ultimately, Pauly Shore is remembered for being a loud, unfunny flash in the pan.  He contributed nothing of value to acting or to film, his legacy bears some of the worst films of the 90’s and he is by and large one of the most hated performers of all time.  After the mid-90’s, audiences just refused to buy into Shore’s crap, and even though he seems to vehemently refuse to go away for good, nobody really cares about him, and he is pretty easy to ignore.

Worst Actors - Katherine Heigl

Katherine Heigl: "Huh?!  Did somebody
say one-sided feminism?!"
Source: timeinc.net

Hollywood is rough on women.  Stories of corrupt and perverted producers using their power and influence to manipulate women with the promise of fame permeate the history of film and go all the way back to the silent era.  It may seem as though things have gotten worse, but for those that make that argument, I refer them to the 1970’s, when entire theaters devoted to showing movies involving gang rape, exploitation and simulated sexual murder existed.  The famed 42nd street Grindhouse theaters in Manhattan poured out seemingly endless misogyny and it was, at least for the most part, accepted, but not respected.  Over the years, actresses have been more and more outspoken in their desire to be seen as artists, not as sex objects.  

The problem that seems to work against this trend is the fact that such a large portion of the film audience is male.  However, in recent years, the MPAA has reported an increase in size and the frequency of female audiences across the country.  This can be largely attributed to the massive and steadily-growing demographic of teen girls, who have generally controlled mainstream popular culture since the 1960’s.  They are the most devoted and most valuable market in the entertainment industry as a whole.  Still, the overall value of the films aimed at female audiences seems to remain at a steady rating of bleh!

There are a few types of female-centric films. These range from the typical, predictable romance to the movie about a strong female overcoming adversity.  You also have the Jane Austen-style high-art romantic drama that has had ebbs and flows throughout the last thirty years or so.  Do not forget the film about a troubled young girl and her struggles or the coming of age movie aimed at adolescent females.  Still, with all of the cliches and forced drama found in those above categories, the worst sub-genre of them all is the dreaded romantic comedy!  

Rom-coms are no strangers to worst of the year film lists and the Golden Raspberry Awards ceremonies.  This has remained true for decades.  Still, somehow things have gotten worse over the last five or six years.  This is largely due to the fact that a recent trend in romantic comedies is to attract women in their thirties and forties with highly sexual and shamelessly one-sided romance plots.  This is likely the result of the massive spike in divorce rates and the market-tested idea that men are worthless and women should be presented as their superiors.  Now, as a male, I find that offensive, which makes me a chauvinist, at least according to those that push this agenda.  

One such agenda-pusher is Katherine Heigl.  This was a lot of setup, I know, but I’m going to make a point here: Katherine Heigl is a despicable human being.  Most people do not remember her pre-Grey’s Anatomy career.  This is because she spent most of it bouncing between low-to-no budget movies with little-to-no value.  The two most prominent roles of her early career were a fairly large part in the dirt-stupid horror cash-in Bride of Chucky and the asinine Steven Seagal vehicle Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.  In 2001, she had a supporting role in the mostly-forgotten teen thriller Valentine, released in a period where this genre was still riding the waves of success created by the overrated Scream franchise.  This was then followed up by a few seasons spent on the WB series Roswell.  

I breezed through that last paragraph because, despite her having a strong and fairly consistent showing early in her career, she never made an impact on anyone.  This is telling because even Denise Richards maintained some credibility despite her lack of talent, and she was billed above this actress who would go on to have far more success than her.  Heigl was barely a B-lister, floating around from role to role, trying to find that breakout hit.  

In the mid-2000’s, Grey’s Anatomy was looking more and more like a pit stop for Heigl.  The show centered on a group of female medical interns and residents who slept around with each other’s boyfriends, got into bitter arguments and cried about broken friendships and failed romances for five years.  E.R. was a good show.  It was serious, had characters that were likable throughout its run and it felt like there were actual lives at stake in the show.  Grey’s Anatomy, as a rule, put the medical drama on the back burner in favor of a bland-as-hell sex drama focusing on narcissistic and generally unlikable people.  The show was, however, considered by some to be sexually-empowering to women.  I hate the term sexually-empowering, because it really just means, if a woman writes a female character that is a slut, it’s okay.  This trend has kept us from having a strong, engaging female protagonist in a quality film because most of them are still sexual objects, no matter which gender wrote them.  The double-standard here is infuriating.  I don’t like it when men pigeonhole women into sex-centric parts that exist for titillation, so why would I find it okay when a woman does it?  This, by the way, would become the focus of Katherine Heigl’s entire career.

During her run on Grey’s Anatomy, she appeared in several movies.  I’ll talk about them in a second, but I want to focus for a moment on a little 2006 film called Zyzzyx Rd.  The story of Zyzzyx Rd. involves a married man sleeping with a women he meets at a casino.  That woman (played by Heigl), has a psycho boyfriend named Joey who interrupts their little fling at a hotel and attacks her new-found lover.  Joey is overpowered, however and is thought to be dead, but as they drive to the middle of nowhere in the Southern California desert to dispose of the body, Joey escapes and pursues the couple.  It’s a pretty by-the-numbers thriller.  There’s nothing particularly special about it or anything… at least nothing about the plot is special.  No, what makes Zyzzyx Rd. so captivating is it’s post-production history.

It has never been officially confirmed or denied, but the director of Zyzzyx Rd. may have been trying to take advantage of a tax loophole that saves him some coin if his film gets a recognized theatrical run.  That is why, some think, the movie ran for a few days, with only a few showings, in a single theater in Dallas, TX.  The film’s total gross was $30, and all of those tickets went to the director, Heigl and a few other cast members.  Nobody saw this movie.  In fact, Heigl has come out as actively trying to block it from getting a DVD release, something that did not happen until a few years later.  So there you have it, folks!  Katherine Heigl’s most significant footprint in film history: She starred in the lowest-grossing movie of all time.

After the Zyzzyx Rd. debacle, Heigl appeared in the 2007 Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up.  The film followed a loser who accidentally impregnates a woman after a one-night stand.  It’s a funny indictment of the stay-at-home generation and slackers in general.  As I mentioned in my Adam Sandler article, I believe Judd Apatow is talented enough to wring a good performance out of even Billy-freaking-Madison!  So, how did this pan out for Heigl?  Not good!  She was stiff, obnoxious, unsympathetic and just all-around unlikable through most of the otherwise-good movie.   Heigl actually came out after the movie and said she did not like the character she played and that she thought the movie was sexist.  Heigl has a tendency to lash out at her projects if she feels women are not painted in the proper light and in the case of Knocked Up, she thought the movie made her look like a stuck up woman with no sense of humor or empathy.  So, in response to this, she teams up with her mother (of all people) to write a feminist sex comedy in which she plays a stuck up woman with no sense of humor or empathy!

Heigl is apparently a follower of Zardoz!
"Penis... is... evil!!!"
source: nj.com 

For those who do not know me, I consider the Ugly Truth one of the most purely-awful movies ever made (read my likely-poorly-written review here).  I hated every second of this pandering, sleazy, unfunny disaster of a movie.  Gerard Butler comes off as a complete asshole, and he is meant to be the male proxy of the movie!  He represents ME!?  No!!!  He represents all men!  All men care about is sex.  They don’t want to talk, they don’t have respect for women, they just want one-and-done, bang and gone, here’s $100 now have a nice pregnancy, SEX!  …  PENIS!!!

I laid out my opinions of this film before.  The premise involves a TV executive named Abby (played by Heigl), who’s cat (she’s single with a cat… progressive!) changes her TV channel by stepping on the remote and she ends up on a relationship advice show called the Ugly Truth hosted by a pig named Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler).  Chadway doles out terrible relationship advice from the perspective of a guy who probably learned everything he knows about relationships from beer ads in the late 80’s.  So we get a brief scene where Abby calls the show, instantly gets through (likely because this show probably wouldn’t get more than six viewers in the real world) and attempts to rebuke him to no avail.  Then, the very next day, she finds out that Mike Chadway has been hired on her news program!  Now, let’s put aside the fact that as a producer she would have at least some say in who makes it on her show.  If we actually gave it any thought whatsoever, the entire premise of this movie wouldn’t float in Jello, so we have to just take what we are given.  From here we get numerous scenes where Chadway says things on live TV that would get the show numerous FCC fines and would definitely get him fired, followed by him giving Abby relationship advice from a guy’s perspective, and I’ll tell you, it IS the kind of advice an obviously anti-man writer would write for a male character like this too.  One contrivance follows another until the end.  It was awful.  It still is not the worst romcom I’ve seen, but it’s up there.  It’s really, REALLY high up there!

The Ugly Truth was pretty much a resounding death knell for Heigl’s mainstream career.  She spent the next few years appearing in uninspired romantic crap like 27 Dresses, a movie I did not see, and the absolute epic-fail of a movie called New Year’s Eve, a failed follow-up to the ensemble romance film Valentine’s Day from 2010.  The film was directed by famed TV writer Gary Marshall, who also has a history of directing mostly-bad romantic comedies.  In New Year’s Eve, Heigl plays Julie, an ex-girlfriend of a singer who is scheduled to perform at the holiday ceremonies.  She was stiff and bland as always but she, like everyone else in this movie, is lost in the shuffle.  There are literally a dozen romance plots happening simultaneously in this film at any given point.  It would be even harder to follow if the characters were not all cookie-cutter archetypes living out soap opera romance cliches.  

In One For the Money (2012), Heigl plays an out-of-work, single woman who turns to bounty hunting and then who tracks down bail jumpers for spare cash.  I swear this plot was put together using those sentence refrigerator magnets or worse, the notorious movie plot dart board!  It is so contrived, so badly-acted, and so unoriginal that I actually did not finish watching it.  I started, got to the point where she is assigned to track down a guy with mob ties despite having no training or proper gear… and that was it for me.  I could not take it anymore.  It also brought back horrible memories of the 2010 movie the Bounty Hunter (review here), a film I hated more than the Ugly Truth.  It’s also worth noting that One for the Money tanked at the box office, barely clearing half of its overall budget domestically, and with total worldwide gross totaled in, it still lost roughly $4 million of its $40 million dollar budget.  It’s looking like sunset on this once-praised performer’s career.

Her most recent film is this years flop the Big Wedding.  I did not see it and I do not intend to, really.  I just don’t have any interest in her pandering tripe anymore, not even for the purpose of a review.  Katherine Heigl had a slow rise, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she’s a woman.  No, her issues with breakout out into the mainstream came as a result of her utter lack of anything resembling talent.  She is, and I am saying this with all sincerity, one of the worst female leading ladies I have ever seen in any major Hollywood film.  She makes Tatum O'Neal look like Katherine Hepburn!  She has to be one of the luckiest women alive too, because for about five years, she was one of the biggest new stars in Hollywood, for no reason except that she was attractive.  That’s it.  What’s truly amusing about this is I am not alone in this opinion.  She has been the subject of ridicule for years due to her bad performances and her complete refusal to just go away!  The Onion News Network released one of their funniest segments about her, and she has maintained a fairly steady and justified army of haters ever since 2005.

Worst Actors - Dwayne Johnson

Not Dwayne Johnson.  Still, this picture is awesome!
Source: superbwallpapers.com

The Wrestler-to-Actor transition has been a rocky one.  In spite of that, Wrestlers are performers in their own right.  What they do is much like a very technical and occasionally-dangerous dance, and it takes skill to prevent injury when two-to-three-hundred-pound men are flying around a ring and smashing into each other and are slamming into the mat.  I’m not really sure why pro-wrestlers have had so much trouble taking off in Hollywood.  I would assume that, in most cases, it is a result of them not wanting to step back and take a smaller role, allowing themselves to be carried by better actors.  Some actors were just not meant to be leading men.

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson was a hit during his run from the mid 90’s and onward in the WWF (which became the WWE in 2002).  He was considered by his fans as a quotable, likable and energetic performer.  It did not take long for his acting career to stem from his charismatic image.  This all began with the birth of the recurring character The Scorpion King in 2001.

The Mummy Returns was a sequel to the 1999 Steven Sommers adventure reboot.  The first film attempted to create an Indiana Jones-esque hero out of mediocre actor Brenden Fraser and was accepted by audiences.  The sequel, however, ruined the camp fun of the first by wrapping the story around an epic mythos that was really tough to swallow, and it all culminated in a climax that was so silly that even Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was laughing at it.  The Rock’s role in the film was in the prologue, following the backstory of the Scorpion King.  His performance was more or less non-existent.  He did little to add to the role and despite his considerable size he managed to seem smaller than the already barely-written role, due mainly to his lack of lines or any depth in the Scorpion King character.

The very next year, a spin-off (cash-in), was released entitled the Scorpion King, which was meant to clear up some of the more confusing elements of the second movie.  Instead, we got a typical and bland summer actioner where we can see how much work went into to making the movie marketable, but not actually good or visually-impressive.  The film was packed with the common things that make so many films of its ilk suck.  You had a bland, barely-acted villain, shallow and unfunny comic relief and a hero that was, while more fleshed out than his previous iteration, played like an irritated jerk who acted as though he just did not want to be on set.  Everything about the Scorpion King reeked of market-tested, committee-written cynicism.  It was an example of everything wrong with the major Hollywood studios.

Johnson continued his wrestling career while moving on to his next major film project: The Rundown.  Directed by Hollywood-hack Peter Berg, the Rundown was a vanilla action comedy with a story that was dumb and comic relief that sucked, as it almost always does.  Dwayne Johnson, however, was growing as a performer here, and comparing his performance in the Rundown to those in the Mummy movies, I can see where some people thought he may have a future as a leading man.  Still, Johnson suffered, as did everyone else in the project, from the fact that the movie was written by the guy who wrote Major League II and a director who would go on to make Battleship!  I don’t care if your movie is written by the Epstein Twins and starred Henry Fonda and Cary Grant, you are not going to end up with a good movie of you’re working with a director THIS bad.  Therefore, I attribute most of the Rundown’s failings to Peter Berg, not Dwayne Johnson.  

Johnson followed this one up with a slightly more serious performance in the completely unnecessary remake of the 1973 low-budget, post-western genre piece Walking Tall.  Johnson took over the role originally portrayed by Joe Don Baker, but here he was at least a little more likable, and that is one thing I will give the man credit for, it’s really hard to not like him, at least personality-wise.  The Rock is incredibly charismatic and this comes out in even his worst performances.  Walking Tall failed due to a rehashed premise that was adapted from material that was not all that good to begin with.  Johnson plays a war vet who comes home to a town run by crooks and dirtbags, so he runs for sheriff and cleans up the streets with the help of an old friend played annoyingly by Johnny Knoxville.  Wait a minute… Is that not similar to the plot of China O’Brien?  So, would that make China O’Brien a pseudo-remake of the original Walking Tall?  Wow!  I have seen WAAAAAY too many movies!  

Johnson had a small role in the awful retread Be Cool, which was a follow-up to the successful comedy Get Shorty.  The film’s plot is exactly the same as the first, just replace movie industry with the music business and that’s it.  It sucked, but the Rock did not have much to do with this movie.  He was, however, a major contributing factor to why his next major film project sucked so damn bad.

The Doom video game series has been around since the early 90’s and is fondly remembered as a superior first-person-shooter that has stood the test of time despite extensive improvements in its genre.  The film, like any movie based on a video game, pays almost no attention to the game’s plot (what little plot there is to begin with) and just has Johnson forgo his charismatic side altogether, instead embracing a brooding asshole named Sarge.  Doom was universally-panned by fans and critics alike and is widely agreed to as being one of the worst films of the 2000’s.  The film’s major contribution is first-person-shooter-cam, a laughable gimmick used near the end of the movie designed to tie the movie to the game.  Fans hated this stupid and pandering concept, critics were baffled by it and it has not been attempted in a major film since.. thank GOD!

It was around this time that Dwayne Johnson had attempted to completely forgo his moniker of “The Rock” and instead attempted to embrace a more serious film career, retiring from wrestling and focusing on his newer Hollywood career.  His next choice is both captivating and understanding, though it did not do his career any favors.  Richard Kelly was very quickly rising in the ranks among praised indie filmmakers after his mind-bending exploration of a troubled teen’s psyche in Donnie Darko.  Kelly’s earlier works also included a stylized telling of the true story of a female bounty hunter in Domino.  The captivating and nontraditional filmmaker’s next project, however, will create a massive rift between its very few fans and its avid detractors.

Southland Tales was a project that may have suffered from the fact that it was a little too ambitious on paper.  The premise is certainly interesting.  The lives of three people, an amnesiac actor (played by Johnson), a porn star and a paranoid conspiracy-theorist-cop all collide amidst the dawn of a devastating environmental disaster in Los Angeles in the near-future.  The story was layered and complex… maybe a little too complex.  Kelly has already made a name for himself by directing stories that were notoriously hard to follow at times, but Southland Tales was the last straw for most people.  Fans of the movie claim that those that don’t like it “just don’t get it”.  I, however, hate that argument.  It is pretentious and undefendable.  Southland Tales failed because it had a terrible cast, a messy screenplay and some strange directorial quirks like the overuse of a wide-angle lens and a strange series of chroma-key filters that often made the film appear dusty and unattractive.  It had little to do with the fact that some people may not understand the plot, because the plot is not really all that hard to grasp.  What is confusing, however, is how the endless list of characters and their often-unexplained motivations go unchecked and how seemingly-major subplots are dropped and unresolved.  

Shortly after Southland Tales understandably bombed at the box office, Dwayne Johnson signed the one contract that is most notorious for ending major actors’ careers: the Disney Contract!  He was hamfistedly shoehorned into cameo roles on many of Disney’s lame, teeny-bopper sitcoms and began appearing in uninspired sports movies, a trademark genre of Disney since the 50’s, but even more prominently-so since the early 90’s.  The first sports romp he was tossed into was the bland football drama Gridiron Gang, which was one part the Mighty Ducks, one part Lean On Me.  It was not a good movie, and I do not think anyone who worked on it, Johnson included, really gave a shit.

Next up was the Game Plan, a Disney cliche-fest about a playboy football star who suddenly learns he has a daughter and is forced to man up and take care of her.  It’s sappy sentimentalism at its most heinous and is filled with the typical emasculating humor these movies are so well-known for.  However, Disney was not done with making the Rock look like a complete ass just yet, oh no!  

After playing a minor role in the big screen adaptation of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s 1960’s hit TV comedy series Get Smart, he was thrown into another unwanted, unneeded Disney mess.  The film was Race to Witch Mountain, a reboot, of sorts, of a short-lived series of Disney films from the 70’s about two alien children who are being escorted to safety from pursuers bent on exploiting their supernatural gifts.  In the original films it was a crooked millionaire that was chasing the kids and their entourage.  In the reboot, the villains are a corrupt underground organization of sorts.  To be perfectly honest, I never was a big fan of the original Witch Mountain movies and this did not inspire much promise in me for this movie, so I passed on it.  I just found it amusing that Disney is so creatively bankrupt at this point that they are tapping into their dreaded 1970’s pool of films for material to adapt.  They’ll be at the 80’s soon, and I can just smell the CGI-riddled remake of Honey I Shrunk the Kids coming right around the corner!

After Witch Mountain barely cleared a profit things were not looking good for Dwayne Johnson and the roles were starting to dry up.  He had, by this time considered giving into pressure to return to pro-wrestling but was still hoping against hope, I guess, that he would land that one big role that would send him over the top.  It never came.  He appeared in the under-marketed Planet 51, which bombed… extensively-so.  It was a strange meta-commentary of sorts where an alien family, that lives in what appears to be 1950’s extraterrestrial suburbia, encounters a human astronaut that lands on their home world.  I can just picture the pitch meeting for this dreck:  “Get it!?  He’s HUMAN but on THEIR planet…  N-N-Now!  …  Get this..!  HE’S the ALIEN!!!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  HAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!”  Still, his ultimate humiliation was just about a year away.

I have commented before about Hollywood’s fascination with emasculating alpha male action stars.  It is not really all that new.  However, in 2011, it hit an all-time low.  Hulk Hogan in a Tutu in Mr. Nanny looks like the Old Spice guy in a boxing match with a flaming grizzly bear riding a T-Rex compared to Tooth Fairy.  Oh, man.  Tooth Fairy is about a hockey player who is recruited to become a  a tooth fairy because Disney didn’t have anything else.  Well, actually, it was because he stole the dollar left under his girlfriend’s daughter’s pillow that was meant for her, then he tells her there is no Tooth Fairy.  His punishment is being a flying man with fairy wings.  Tooth Fairy was panned by critics and it basically made Dwayne Johnson look like a joke.  The movie made back its already comparatively-low budget but was not really all that much of a success.  The film was obviously meant to be an attempt to rekindle the success found in the Santa Clause, but it did not reach that level of popularity.

He had a small role in the action comedy the Other Guys and followed that up with the truly dreadful revenge/action/thriller Faster.  His career was not looking up to be honest.  In fact, it was looking more and more like he was just going to fade away.  He appeared in Fast Five, the fourth sequel in the inexplicably-expansive Fast & the Furious series in 2011 and then we got yet another unwanted sequel to a movie nobody liked.  Thanks, Disney!  Journey 2: The Mysterious Island had Johnson replacing Brenden Fraser’s lead in the first film.  I did not see it, but reaction was lukewarm, but the film made money, so it became clear that Dwayne Johnson could still draw an audience.  It was at this point that the likable but bland-acting Dwayne Johnson made a truly baffling career decision.

This next movie is going to require some explanation.  In 1994, a Florida man named Marc Schiller was kidnapped and brutally tortured by three men called the Sun Gym Gang, so named after their favorite workout establishment.  During his capture he was abused, mocked, his family was threatened, he was repeatedly burned with a light and was forced to sign over a small fortune to the three men.  After he agreed to sign the papers, and did so, they gang decided to murder him, setting his murder up to look like a drunk-driving accident. He was forced to drink copious amounts of liquor then the gang drove his car into a pole, an incident he escaped with his life.  They tried to kill him again by repeatedly running over the weak man with their car and fleeing.  Schiller survived still.  He took legal action against the men.  The story became a notorious act of violence in the Miami, Florida area.  It is an absolutely true story.  Schiller’s family was traumatized by the news and the ordeal as a whole.  So what does superstar asshole Michael Bay decide to do?  He makes an action comedy about the events!

Horrible acts of violence make Michael Bay soooo hot!
source: cdn.ientry.com

I’m not a prude.  I take no issue in adapting a story from a real-life criminal event.  Still, it is important to understand just how real and brutal these men are.  They are murderous thugs with no remorse and no wits about them.  In Pain & Gain, we get the three punks, played by Johnson, Mark Wahlberg and Anthony Mackie and their atrocities mostly played for laughs.  The film has been described as a “black comedy” but that’s bullshit!  That is Bay and Executive Producer Matthew Bruce covering their tactless asses.  This is designed to look like a shocking, violent action thriller, with a comic edge, and I honestly think we’re supposed to side with the Sun Gym Gang in this movie!  The film has defenders, even some major film critics liked it, but the fact that Bay would stoop so low as to make a movie meant for laughs about such a brutal crime astounds me.  I truly believe Michael Bay is just an idiot.  He is an incompetent filmmaker, he always has been.  He is also a notorious chauvinist, which comes off quite often in his filmmaking, Pain & Gain included.   Dwayne Johnson, like everyone else in this movie, just comes off as uncomfortable.  Like he knows he’s doing something very bad and is trying to just get it over with.  

Dwayne Johnson is certainly not as bad of an actor as Adam Sandler, Tyler Perry or Chris Tucker.  He is at least somewhat charismatic and he is able to exude some emotion and confidence under the proper direction.  His problem comes mostly in his poor choice of films.  I think, with the right talent directing and with a proper screenplay, we could see Dwayne Johnson show some real chops in a supporting role.  Maybe he could benefit from a role that puts him into a position of vulnerability without it being humiliating like Tooth Fairy. A performance where he has to actually act, not just stand there and look muscular, but where he is not required to carry an entire scene.  As it stands, Dwayne Johnson, as likable as he may be, suffers from not being willing to step aside for better work, taking what comes his way.  This sort of career model never ends well.