Everyone is Wrong about The Rock, including The Rock.

The Rock has spent the last decade forming himself into something, something everyone can understand, something accessible to all, aspirational, masculine, a prepackaged enlarged mass of “hard work” and the “right”. A moral attitude rich in vagueness, and smiles. What he has not become is a respected actor. The reasons for this are varies and many, but the consensus is a reduction of these variables, a simplification born of exhaustion and interestingly enough, racism.

It is negligence to have any sort of discourse around the Rock that does not include race, and the role it has played in his career, both in first quarter of his filmography and his evolution into the full regalia of “racially ambiguous”. As Wesley Morris stated in a piece for the Boston Globe; “At the center of Johnson's career is a question of both identity and identification”. Johnson's politics were never left, and never particularly strong on race, so the distilled nature of the approach is partly on him. His films have always done some version of side stepping the issue, and he has always held for a sentimental idea of how race is employed, but some of his early roles didn’t all-together refute acknowledgement he was bi-racial, and the Rock for his part has never denied it. During a press run for 2004’s “Walking Tall” he openly admitted the factor his race played in his interpretation of the real life character it was based on; “How, as a man, can I call myself Buford Pusser, when I'm not white, and I'm a man of color? I'm honest with it. I just wanted to take the essence of what he stood for”.

“The Scorpion King”, “Walking Tall”, “The Rundown”, “Be Cool”, and “Southland Tales”, implicitly or explicitly channeled or referred to his race as either “other” or bi-racial. The Scorpion King and Rundown as “other”, Walking Tall, Be Cool, and Southland Tales as bi-racial, but his work post-2010 strayed further and further from identity and into a Hollywood formed identification. It should also be mentioned that those movies grossed around 232.5 Million worldwide…combined. This had to be crushing, in this industry, Box Office is your barometer, like it or not. Johnson was taking risks and testing his range, but the industry and the audience just didn't seem to be responding to him as a box office star, bi-racial man, or a serious actor - all things that brought him to the top of his first profession in wrestling.

The movie that would jump start the Rock’s run as an international superstar, (changing the shape and direction of his career) interestingly enough is the series he wasn't really the star of when he joined, and thus had to leave it when the other guy knew his value and wasn't budging. Vin Diesel and co. had by that time had begun the successful transition of this garage band movie into a box office juggernaut that acted more like Bond films than a testosterone soap opera for degenerate twenty-somethings. Very few of the F&F films (if any) are well made films, but they're a boat load of fun, and they know what they are. They found an audience and then rode it to victory. It may be no accident (at least subconsciously) that this attracted The Rock to the franchise, but that also tells you a lot about the Rock's philosophical leanings as it pertains to art and business. Everything post Furious for the Rock captures almost none of what made the series magical. In possibly trying to carry that success into a new road map his Seven Bucks Productions (created with ex wife Danny Garcia) pushed his career too far into a realm that look and function like an algorithm, cynical, and worse still predictable because they’re cynical. Drained of any of the sense of compass the fast and furious had because they lack the sense of self their actor was now waffling on. “San Andreas” “Rampage”, “Skyscraper”, are thinly plotted places and states of being, more the they are movies, very few have room to be anything but one word or two. The movies are ad-vehicles for selling dead things to us; retro video games, a well remembered Robin Williams starrer, the nostalgia of old Disney. The Rock as a stand-in for Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Sylvester Stallone, all of which are gone and are definitely in no way present in the novelty cups-as-movies that he kept pushing out on an assembly line. That is what a brand is supposed to be it seems; predictable by way of reliability and most importantly aversion from risk, but it's the exact wrong lessons to take from the F&F franchise. As dumb as the Fast and Furious movies are they are anything but predictable, unless you mean the only predictable thing about them; that each installment will be wilder than the next. They took a risk changing the entire mood, tone, and feel of the first few installments, into something massive in scope and yet still communal. They are wild, fearless, sexy, exciting, and dumb. By contrast, Dwayne Johnson’s efforts outside that franchise are tame, tepid, sexless, boring, and haven't the good sense to be schlock. The promise with each installment is that one will be more forgettable than the other.

Johnson seemed to misunderstand his predecessors and inspirations; Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Tom Cruise were all known to take risk in their career choices and/or their type. In Cruise’s case it was “Born on the 4th of July”, “Interview with a Vampire”, or “Eyes Wide Shut” all of which strayed from the image Tom Cruise had worked hard to create about what kind of actor he was. All of which happened early enough in his career to challenge and disrupt completion, familiarity, and boredom. This latest version of Johnson, (now back to The Rock) is bigger, stronger, more physically imposing in almost every sense of the word than any of those inspirations not named Arnold -but will take no such risk, be they physical or in the context of his filmography. In fact when looking at the Rock's Box office peers of the past, There's only one that looks a lot like him and that is Will Smith, and only in the sense that both have been extremely risk averse in their choices. Hyper-concern with the quality and sanctity of their image is what holds them back as actors, because the talent is certainly there. Movie star or not, being an actor with the kind of legend Rock wants to some extent involves destruction and deconstruction of perception, celebrity, on the other hand is about curating, and to some extent involves a constant maintaining of perception. Johnson’s career at this point is a prime example of the distinction sociologist Stuart Hall makes between the popular artist and the mass performer in “The Popular Arts” when he says - "The distinction between popular and mass art will be clearer if we take an example of the difference between a popular artist and a mass performer in their attitudes towards their audience and their work. Both are more 'aware' of their audience than the high artist. But whereas the popular artist, feeling his audience in his bones, concentrates everything on making anew and creating, the mass artist seems to be in total subjection to his audience, nervously aware of it, desperately afraid of losing touch”. It's not exactly trigonometry to guess which one The Rock has been for what is now the greater part of his career. One cannot serve two masters, movie stars are celebrities by consequence of the work they do, not the other way around.

The Rock, by design has earned just about all of the criticism he’s gotten as his popularity has seemed to hit it's first major snag, leaving him open to critiques that have always been just beneath the surface, if not on it. My issue with a lot of the criticism is that collectively they seem to suggest an inherent lacking in Dwayne Johnson the actor, not his choices, or the quality of projects afforded him early on, and furthermore they ignore the obstacles and variables that played into the choices. These arguments are a continuation of a nonsensical idea that actors filmographies are something they have immense control over. That since actors have this control over the quality of work, then how that quality shows up is on their heads. Bias and disdain take over from here, and now that there are others whose careers look anywhere from modestly to far better, it has become even more common to hear “The Rock can't act” or that he is the least of his wrestler-turned-actor peers. Take for instance, Jon Cena, or Dave Bautista, it must first be understood that what Dave Bautista or Jon Cena get to do, they do because of what The Rock did. If Dwayne Johnson doesn't exist, if he doesn't become a formidable actor, no one takes wrestler-turned actors serious enough to even think about casting a Dave Bautista in the roles he's gotten. Before Dwayne Johnson, it can be argued that wrestlers were mostly side shows in movies that played like a carnival barker screaming at us to observe these hulking oddities in their “habitat”. In Rob Reiner's delightful “The Princess Bride” Andre the Giant is well..a Giant, and fundamentally the draw there is in the currency of an oddity living in an odd world. It's far kinder, but nonetheless based in not as much a character as a fit. No one ever took wrestlers seriously enough to believe in them as serious actors unless they were a counter culture maverick, like John Carpenter. It would take someone to know the difference between how a John Carpenter movie was regarded then in contast to now to know how or why “They Live” wasn't exactly a game changer at the box office or in clout, and then why, unfortunately, we never really saw Roddy Piper in mainstream film much after. The quality of characters in a Bautista, or Cena career may be far better, but any cursory look at the issue concedes the Rock had to be the forebearer for all of these guys, while acknowledging the facts that he too wanted to be taken seriously at first. “Actually I had a lot of leeway and latitude with (director) F. Gary Gray. Although Elliott was written in the novel by Elmore (Leonard), we had to start from scratch. I didn’t take the role specifically to get away from the action genre. Actors always wait for that role to be fearless, where they can jump off the cliff, and for me that was this role, an opportunity to play a guy who was conflicted in a world that he didn’t want to be in, and still felt that he had something to offer the world through song and dance. He was a gay man who was proud and by the end of the movie embraced even more being gay. These words are not much different than Dave Bautista’s, on acting, but no one near the sphere of artistic influence that Denis Villanueve, Sam Mendes, or even a James Gunn posess in Hollywood were running up to give The Rock pictures like this then. What they weren't exactly ready for then, they are now, and it is of no small importance that John Cena is white, and though Dave Bautista is of mixed heritage as well, his career to date has been far more racially ambiguous than The Rock’s first run.

The fair question to ask right alongside how the Rock ultimately become so bland a action star, is why no one truly believed (s) in his talent? And maybe what effect that has had on him over the years, especially considering his politics. Maybe, because so often in Hollywood how good you are is confused with the overall quality of your projects, and worse yet, your box office- there was no room for the nuance that the Rock had to start off with a handicap. That the only folks checking for, chosen by, or provided to him were journeyman directors like Chuck Russell, Kevin Bray, Andrzej Bartkowiak, and Phil Joanou, and only one of them could be called a quality journeyman. That the scripts were usually solid, and written by journeyman writers like Jeff Maguire, or William Osborne, betraying a lack of understanding of where action was headed, and what they had in the Rock. These were pictures in the vein of the past, for past icons. Short on money, big on The Rock, and nothing else. That this was the level of risk Hollywood was willing to take with wrestlers, (and a bi-racial wrestler to boot) up until this point because they were not proven commodities as bankable leads or skilled actors. That the Rock is a lead, and the others character actors. That the Rock wanted to be successful as an actor and found rejection. The two highest profile collaborations of the Rock's career up to Fast and Furious were films respectively by Peter Berg (The Rundown) and F. Gary Gray, (Be Cool) and neither set the world on fire. These were no worse projects than “The Scorpion King 3”, “The Man with the Iron Fist” or “Riddick”- the movies Dave Bautista started in before he got “Guardians of the Galaxy”. Still, there were to be no offers out there courting the Rock to higher quality directors, writers, or projects. Some insight may be gleamed from another action star peer of his - Jason Statham. While doing press for “The Bank Job”, (one of Statham’s best) Statham himself expressed some frustration with Hollywood's unwillingness to see him in any other light than the last thing that made money, and the impoverished nature of the scripts and the unproven directors. The truth is being an “action star" has always been mired in less than subtle bias that automatically insists your work is lower in class, giving little credit to the craft in them until very recently. It's warranted to some degree given the tendency for these films to lean on archetypes, but the aughts era that folks like The Rock and Jason Statham were born into were the beginning of particularly lean times for the genre which only furthered the notion. No one of unusual talent seemingly wanted to direct action or be good at it anymore. There were no John McTiernan’s, Paul Verhoevens, Ivan Reitman’s, Renny Harlin’s Ted Kotcheff’s, Richard Donner’s or Tony Scott’s to guide his career the way they did for his predecessors. Nonetheless, despite being inhibited by a lack of creative influence to test or challenge his acting prowess, (never mind the surplus of budget) he still found a way to carve out a number of really good performances that betrayed a range he's still not being given credit for. For all it's shoddy goofiness the Scorpion King is not the same kind of hero characteristically as “Walking Tall”. He's having much more fun, and he's much more in the vein of Arnold Schwarzenegger's one liner melee in “Total Recall” than let's say Sylvester Stallone's somber hard body in First Blood. “Elliott Wilhelm” the kind hearted, but misguided bodyguard in “Be Cool” is truly a piece of art. Dwayne never talks down to the role. His performance of the “Bring it On” scene would be cringe if it weren't for the fact that he approaches it with such child-like glee. There are some brilliant choices made, and everything he does once Travolta’s Chili tells him he's “being rude” is a deft understanding of character, despite how cartoonish a person Elliott is. The mulling over in his head, the look over to Uma Thurman, the little dance he does before he gives in. It's total commitment not to the gag but to whats behind it. Which is not because he's effeminate, which would be low and homophobic, but because he's dedicated to his dream in a way very few of us can be. He's so unafraid to be him and that kind of daring can make us laugh too if for no other reason than it makes us uncomfortable to be in the presence of someone so almost embarrassingly affirmed in who they are. It's sort of the same feeling that comes from watching someone like a William Hung. There's something sweet and a bit inspiring about someone so endearingly connected to something impossible. Pushing right through the boundaries of not only what's expected, but what they can do to the point that what is clearly bad somehow becomes an overall good. The Rock's performance built it's foundation on this.

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The Rock's ability to make a cunning deconstruction of what we think of him, just as we believe we know him is his art, and when storytellers have engaged with him in this play it has provided some truly fascinating acting. Take a flashback scene in Michael Bay's “Pain and Gain” where he gets caught robbing someone’s house high off coke. Extremely emotional and reactive, his freeze frame when the men arrive upon him is absolute gold! Everything he does as Paul Doyle in Bay's kinetic tale of crash dummies as bank robbers is tied to an astute understanding of the needs of the script, and a concurrent takedown of audience expectations for him and those like him. He plays Doyle as a complex network of possibilities to any given environment triggered by his ideas of manhood. This makes him malleable, and alternatively he uses many of the same expressions he's known for in a context foreign to us until this role. The eyebrows no longer stand for assuredness and misplaced confidence, they are indicative of rabid confusion, and ignorance. Paul spends most of the movie pretending (badly) that reacting to whatever is going on is the same as knowing what's going on. Same goes for his work in Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, save it's softer, less ferocious. Southland Tales is a Richard Kelly film - so nothing is really going to go the way you would expect and Johnson rides those storytelling waves as if he's an all-pro surfer. With roles like these under his belt, with what he did in roles like “Snitch” and “Faster”, If you don't think The Rock could play what Bautista did in Blade Runner (which frankly is vastly overstated) you're kidding yourself about what was needed for that role and what the Rock can do.

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It may in part be due to the fact that we so heavily dismiss the role editors and directors play in an actor's performance that we don't understand what a world of difference it makes to have world-class talent working with you behind the camera. Co-authors that really push you to get a certain kind of performance out, rather than let you get away with the first or second cut. What it means when you have a director who can motivate to get somewhere difficult, to find your character. Talent that sees in you what you may not be able to see in yourself and collaborates with you to help create and mold that by activating even your own imagination, sometimes in places that you didn't think you had the ability to imagine. The power of a really great editor who's really trying to make something that reaches well beyond your own significant abilities and brings it to that place outside the context of yourlimitations, so that it may live on and find life in the collective imaginations of a mass of people means. The importance of a Sally Menke to not only Quentin Tarantino, but the massive consistency he gets out of his actors, or a Thelma Schoonmaker to the legendary performances we've gotten from Scorcese's films. Denis Villeneuve, and Ridley Scott, Rian Johnson, and James Gunn are mostly well thought of, two of them are considered among the best at what they do, and that's because they work with the best as well. That's what Bautista benefits from when his bet on himself is backed by a Gunn, a Mendes, or Villanueve. Bautista and others benefit from that because the Rock proved it possible from a far less privileged position as a bi-racial African -Somoan man, not the ambiguous brand he's turned himself into. Those DECISIONS were The Rock’s but at least in part made by force. The Rock then responded by regressing the part of his career that crafted and played with his image in a myriad of ways from his race to his attitude, to the more acceptable, far more palatable all encompassing caricature you see now, and financially it worked. The same audience members that didn't pay much attention then or now, look a little bit silly going so hard at what they didn't understand as they tout performances by Bautista and Cena that actually are not as good as, and definitely not better than - what The Rock did then, but appear so because of what they have around them.

Under that lens and in that context, The Rock deserves a lot more respect and a little, just a little, more nuance around what has happened to his career because while it may not have been an artful decision, it is clearly an understandable one. I for one wish The Rock would have stayed in the trenches a little longer, waited for it to pop, because eventually it was going to pop. It was inevitable because his talents were that large. They were on display in films like “Snitch” and “Gridiron Gang”, and they're definitely on display in his riskier risk like “Be Cool” “Southland Tales”, and “Pain and Gain”. They're even on display in even his more hapless movies like “Skyscraper” and recently in “Black Adam” where many have let their bias miss what he actually brought and brings. A quote from Matthew Zolller-Seitz recent review of The Rock's performance in “Black Adam” brilliantly makes an observation that connects the Rock to a lineage of former silver screen hard men like Bogart, Anthony Quinn in “La Strada” and of course Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Seitz is absolutely right, the Rock has always been more aware of his place in the line of cinematic leads, especially as it pertains to the hard men of action. He has creatively tried to mold his own place in that rigid valley where he could make his own mark, and to some extent he has, but he has also given in to the cynicality of one of the most unforgiving eras in Hollywood. A craven world of content and algorithms, and one that continues a legacy of stifling opportunities for many, while inexplicably giving others multiple chances. I have no idea why out of all of athletes-turned-actors, whether Jon Cena, MMA star Rampage Jackson, or straight-to-DVD actioneer Scott Adkins, it's Bautista who gets choice roles, but I promise it's not merely because he “wanted to be an actor”. A bevy of opportunities and meetings outside the studio probably came together to allow Bautista to be in rooms where people could recommend him to others based on want they saw. Friends of friends of friends and all that, but Hollywood is not a meritocracy and in no way is your desire in direct corrollation to your career. It's rather disingenuous to pretend anything other than randominty, luck, and the various isms that plague America, play into the differences of career. What the Rock has become is a combination of variables as well, some named here some we may never know, but what he is as an actor is egregiously underrated and misunderstood. What he can be? - Maybe that's the question Hollywood and The “Rock” Dwayne Johnson should be asking from here on in, because up until this point almost everyone including the Rock has been wrong about the Rock.