Review: The Rundown

After the 18A Underworld and Once Upon a Time in Mexico failed to satisfy me action-wise, I had no desire to see The Rundown in its PG glory (especially since it stars The Rock), but man am I glad I did. I've seen it twice actually. Watch out for Peter Berg, he's a great director. He did the horrifically underrated Very Bad Things, and now he's followed up with this action-comedy gem.

This movie kicks ass. The Rock stars as Beck, a "retrieval expert", who's your typical pro who wants to move on to a new life, but has to do one last job first. The job is to go to Brazil and bring Travis Walker (Seann William Scott in full-on Stifler mode) home to his father, to face the music after pissing off rival businessman by sleeping with a married woman.
Once in Brazil (El Dorado, affectionately referred to as Helldorado), Beck discovers that the area is basically a bunch of slaves searching for treasures for Hatcher (Chris Walken in full-on Chris Walken mode!), and that Hatcher wants Travis to lead him to a gold artifact that only he knows the location to.

That's all I'm going to say about the plot, although the trailer revealed much more than that.

The action scenes are very well done, there's the occasional cheesy kick that sends someone flying back 10 feet, but for a pg movie, they're pretty intense at times.

The acting is excellent, The Rock has proven himself in my eyes (There's even a funny little scene at the beginning where Arnold Schwarzenegger walks by him in a club and remarks "have fun." which everyone has declared to be Arnold passing the torch), Scott is very funny and it's good to see him branch out further into action roles (He better stick with roles like this and not with garbage like Bulletproof Monk), Rosario Dawson doesn't have too much to do, but she's very hot and doesn't ruin the mood of the movie or anything by being the only woman there, and Walken is fantastic, and even gets to deliver another one of his great monologues, this time about the tooth fairy, which is worth the price of admission alone.

9/10

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged