The Rundown - Follow The Recipe

my rating: Nathan's rating:

The protagonist of The Rundown is (or at least wants to be) a professional chef, a man who knows how to follow a recipe but also knows how to improvise. So, it seems, are the creators of the movie. It's a fairly formulaic film of the "summer escapist adventure" genre, prepared with all the usual ingredients (borrowed liberally from other movies) and just enough originality to make it entertaining.

It has the Soft-Hearted Tough Guy Stuck Doing One Last Job (played by The Rock). It has the Smart-Mouthed Quarry who doubles as the Man With Questionable Values (Seann William Scott). They'll end up teaming up against the Sociopathic Bad Guy (Christopher Walken). And the Beautiful Woman Who's More Than She Appears To Be (Rosario Dawson) will complicate the plot for everyone. The obligatory Exotic Setting is the wilds of Brazil.

The Rock gets to stretch his acting skills a bit beyond just being an "action hero" and manages the comic bits and even the quiet dialog scenes well enough. Scott's part goes beyond his "Stifler" schtick with some Bulletproof Monk thrown in. Christopher Walken, on the other hand, could have done this performance in his sleep. Rosario Dawson... it's really not much of a role here, but it's a far cry from Pussycat Valerie.

The plot is pretty much by the numbers, with bits taken from similar jungle exploration scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Romancing the Stone. Some of the "humor" comes from Scott's character (with hands cuffed behind his back by the Rock) needing to stop to pee, and from the duo being attacked by horny male monkeys. But these bits are mercifully short.

The script flirts with depth here and there, such as the Rock's character insisting that he doesn't use guns, hinting at a story behind this resolution. But he seems to have no qualms about pointing guns threateningly, which makes his words a bit empty. And the "no shooting" rule is really only there to provide some dramatic tension to the scene when the only way he can save Scott's life is to jump into the fray, shotguns blasting with deadly skill. I guess the message from the Rock here is that Bad Things Happen when you use a gun... unless you use it to pick off a dozen bad guys. Got that, kids?

Nathan is a WWE fan, but one fully aware of how artificial it is. So naturally the choreographed fights and predictable plot didn't bother him. He enjoyed it, but without a lot of enthusiasm. Same here. It doesn't require a lot of intelligence to enjoy, but neither does it require that you be 13 or an idiot.