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Film
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Walking Tall
Much like his career-launching appearance on SNL, The Rock towers above this highly uneven remake of the 1973 ‘hixploitation’ classic.
Friday, April 2, 2004
By Susan Michals
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Filmic dissection is not as easy as it used to be. While we still have the tried and true ‘thumbs up, thumbs down’ approach, there is also that nether region where many films these days frequently seem to land – while entertaining, they can still be ‘entertainingly good’ or, ‘entertainingly bad.’
Both hold your interest. Both are – for lack of a better word – entertaining. But while a movie that is ‘entertainingly good’ usually has all of its components in sync, those that are ‘entertainingly bad’ tend to veer off track in various directions – the most frequent being lack of story or poor character development.
Some may say this kind of criticism is really not taking a stand, so please, grant this writer a cinematic mea culpa and think of it more as an exercise in analytical thought. As we all know, things are not always black or white.
Hollywood’s latest remake, Walking Tall, certainly falls into this purgatory of indecision. Wildly uneven and touted as a action drama, the film often stumbles into the ‘entertainingly good’ territory of unintentional hilarity as it tries desperately overall to avoid spiraling into the dreaded territory of ‘entertainingly bad.’
After a tenured service with the U.S. Special Forces, Chris Vaughn (The Rock) has come home to the backwoods of Washington to begin a new life. However, while Chris was away, his boyhood town has transformed from sugary sweet simplicity to crime ridden Podunkville. All this is thanks to his wealthy high school rival Jay Hamilton (Minority Report’s Neal McDonough), who has closed the local lumber mill – formerly the area’s main source of income – and opened the Wild Cherry Casino in its stead.
Despondent over this turn of events, Vaughn takes it upon himself – with the help of a large piece of lumber – to rid the town of its badness. Unfortunately things don’t go as smoothly as planned as Hamilton’s cronies get a hold of him and beat him to a pulp.
To make matters worse, Vaughn is wrongfully imprisoned for busting up the Wild Cherry. Rallying to his own defense, he is found innocent, runs for Town Sheriff and wins! He enlists the help of his friends, including the reformed druggie Ray Templeton (Johnny Knoxville) to return the town to its innocent roots.
Based on the 1973 version starring Joe Don Baker, which was loosely based on a true story, this Walking Tall is also an abbreviated version – clocking in at a short 86 minutes. In the original, the actor went by his given name – Buford Pusser – but here the protagonist has been renamed Chris Vaughn. This was definitely a wise choice – one can only imagine the wincing on set if the other actors had to call The Rock Buford.
Regar~dless of these issues, there’s no doubt The Rock (a.k.a. Dwayne Johnson) is every inch a box office blockbuster. This guy is a natural born star and exudes a rawness that has nothing to do with the fact that he is a former wrestler. Meanwhile, Johnny Knoxville – soon to be seen in a John Waters film -- remains one of Hollywood’s most underestimated assets; as Ray, he provides much of the comic relief and sees almost as much action as The Rock, in a bit of casting that is as effective as the choice of Seann William Scott for The Rundown.
With this film and his other varied choices of material, Knoxville brings to mind another actor who appeared in a John Waters venture - a quirky and, until recently, often overlooked little fellow by the name of Johnny Depp.
The problem with Walking Tall is not the actors. They are ‘entertainingly good’. Rather, it’s the storyline. Much of film seems stuck in a 1970’s mindset and has not been properly updated to reflect a 21st century sensibility. Subjects that were shocking in 1973 don’t hold our similar attention today, such as the idea that selling crystal meth to local kids is “bad.”
Then there’s the girl, Vaughn’s high school sweetheart Deni (Ashley Scott), who now works at the casino sliding up and down a pole for her daily bread. Scott brings nothing meaty to the role of token love interest. Even her sub-erotic pole dance is so vague and unemotional that the horniest guys in the audience will find themselves as bored as the rest of us.
Although the action, when it finally hits the screen, comes in the form of an all-out slugfest that will have genre fans cheering, the general momentum of the film is outweighed by far too many more simplistic plot points as clichéd as the make-up of Vaughn’s hometown.
In the end, all of these elements, compounded by the fact that this drama is nothing more than an emotionally bereft action comedy, place Walking Tall squarely in the same ‘entertainingly bad’ category once occupied by The Rock’s overly dramatized WWE bouts.
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