You could say it’s tough to be both a “serious” film critic and a fan of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson: of all actors, he is among the least likely to show up in a Jane Campion or Tsai Ming-liang film anytime soon. You could play up the gentle ridicule you receive from those more cultured of your colleagues on whom his volcanic Samoan charms are largely lost (actually: black Nova Scotian/Samoan-American, to be precise about the provenance of his borderline miraculous ethnogenetic melange). You could, among those peers, affect an air of martyrdom in this regard, as though nobly adhering to a principled if unpopular stance, despite being thoroughly misunderstood for your pains. You could even scrabble for high-falutin’ terminology like “Vulgar Auteurism” or “Cinematic Poptimism” or “Reception-Theory-Based Democratic Cinephilia” to legitimize your fondness for an oeuvre that contains such treasures as “the Pec-Pop of love,” in which berries are bounced off Johnson’s dancing pectoral muscles in 3D. Yes, you could do all that and more, but the truth you will carry in your heart is simple: there’s nothing tough about being a fan of The Rock. It’s the easiest thing in the world.
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This is a fact that a jillion people across the globe are willing to stick their hands in their wallets to prove: Dwayne Johnson, as of 2015 (repeating his feat of 2013), is the biggest movie star in the world, to the Wagnerian tune of $1.43 billion dollars last year. Of course, that money is not for him directly, but for his movies, and the successes of his 2015 titles “Furious 7” and “San Andreas” could be chalked as much up to franchise fondness and a love of destruction porn, respectively, as to Johnson’s presence.
In fact, with franchise mainstay Paul Walker‘s tragic early death piquing interest to an all-time high in the seventh installment of the “Fast and Furious” series, and with both it and “San Andreas” actually pulling in by far the vast majority of their coin overseas, where noisy, non-dialogue-driven spectacles like the “Transformers” franchise tend to do well no matter who stars, it would be easy to write off Johnson’s contribution altogether. That is, if only the overperformance of films in which he appears didn’t just keep happening, and if only overseas popularity were not becoming a far more important commodity than it ever has been before. 2015 was a watershed moment for Johnson, but it’s probably less because those films were better than the ones he’d appeared in before, and more because it marked the first time he was really appreciated as integral to the narrative of those box office victories.
This proper-order recognition comes relatively late for Johnson (he is 44), which makes it doubly sweet for him and for his longtime fans (hi there). For once, we have a movie star who has really earned the position, who has fought and worked for every modicum of success he has enjoyed, but who has done so with a kind of unforced, unshakeable, sportsmanlike good humor that suggests that despite all the trash-talking for which The Rock was always known, Dwayne Johnson has the precious ability not to take himself too seriously. Of course a great deal of that no doubt comes from his WWE career, a mystifying demi-monde (for the uninitiated) into which Johnson was born and which he came to dominate in much the same way that his upcoming slate of tentpoles suggests he might do our blockbuster summers for the foreseeable future.
In retrospect, Johnson’s transition to movies feels less like a transition than a growing-into, as though he were a Hulk or an Alice after the Eat Me Cake who just can’t stop outgrowing brands, franchises and properties that are just too inelastic to contain his expanding immenseness. Just think how, even now when it’s become the prime marker of mainstream stardom, there is really no sense that he could take on a comic-book superhero role — not only is he probably too expensive, there’s nothing that he could quite squeeze himself into. The kind of stardom that beckons for Johnson is almost old-fashioned in that regard, in its obliterating megawatt glare, it’s the kind that hasn’t really been seen since the heyday of Tom Cruise or, a more obvious touchpoint, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Johnson namechecks Schwarzenegger a lot, on and offscreen. And for a while back at the beginning of his movie career he was clearly being groomed to inherit the Austrian Oak’s mantle: there’s a hand-off Schwarzenegger cameo in Johnson’s early bid for stardom “The Rundown” that could not be more obviously a passing of the torch if he actually passed him a torch. And even in “The Other Guys,” Johnson makes a speech about Arnie that riffs on his character’s identification with him — it’s played for laughs, but there’s a clear conflation of actor and character in that moment.
But Johnson actually might be selling himself short with the Arnie comparisons: as a physical presence he is obviously just as imposing, but as an actor he has far greater range, as a comedian he has much better innate comic timing and as a personality he has far more easy charm than the Governator ever managed to muster, even at the height of his stardom. Perhaps Johnson is an even older-fashioned star than the action heroes of the ’80s (though he does share the weird quirk of being built like a brick shithouse, yet having the kind of name that gets you beaten up on playgrounds. I mean, Dwayne? Arnold? Sylvester? Dolph?) Perhaps, in being able to deliver a joke and fell a tree with his bare hands while cracking walnuts in the crook of his elbow, he is the closest we have to the all-singing, all-dancing variety star of yore, who was expected to be able to act and yodel and juggle and get the dog to jump through the flaming hoop all at the one time. It may not be High Art, but it sure is entertaining, and there is a purity to the type of entertainment Johnson represents that is refreshingly uncomplicated.
Is The Rock handsome? I really can’t tell, like many other questions it seems faintly irrelevant when it comes to Dwayne Johnson. He is so much his physicality, not just his impressive bulk, but his mobile brow, expressive, unserious eyes and blindingly white smile that the question is somehow moot. He is neither handsome nor ugly. Is he even sexy? He is, tellingly, only rarely given a sex scene (there’s one in “Walking Tall” and some in “Ballers“) even in his non-family-oriented films. It’s not that he is unsexy either though, so perhaps he is somehow simply beyond the definitions that hem in most mortals. The Rock, like The Dude, or maybe anyone who can be referred to with a definite article before his name, abides.
His latest film “Central Intelligence,” an action comedy in which he stars with fellow underrated box office titan Kevin Hart (mystifyingly not subtitled Between The Rock And A Hart Place — *shakes head sadly, weeps lone tear at what might have been*) opens this week. And so as a helpful guide to anyone still at sea as to how this former wrestler became the near-ubiquitous megastar he’s about to be, click on for a guide to my picks for his six best — though very far from biggest — films, aka Dwayne Johnson (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Rock).