As in the classic children's game, "The Scorpion King" represents a case where paper (script) defeats stone (the Rock).
Though spirited and frenetic, and an adequate showcase for the professional wrestler's charisma and humor, "The Scorpion King" never really breaks the barrier between the ordinary and the transcendent. Then it's ultimately undone by its sheer busyness. The screenwriters never get the story to settle down, and it becomes a case of one damn thing after another.
The Rock, aka Dwayne Johnson, is "The Scorpion King."
(Universal Pictures)
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There's another issue, too, which might be called Digital Imagery Fatigue. Seeing this movie, with its vast ancient cityscapes, its plains full of soldiers, its outlandish and gravitationally impossible stunts, made me think of the pathetic little temple built on a Spanish hillside that John Milius had to make do with all those years ago on "Conan the Barbarian," possibly the ur-text of all barbarian movies. Yet when Conan, after separating Thulsa Doom from his head, burned it down, we knew: A real place was burning.
Here, cities explode, armies clash, windstorms howl, the scale is gigantic; but somehow by this time, we all know it's fake, it's a species of cartoon that only exists on some cyberponytail's hard drive. In some way, that leaches the movie of any true power. What remains is the Rock, amid shenanigans, bad acting, bland beauty and sword fights overcranked for a speed on-screen they lacked in life. The big guy, certainly a likable enough fellow on screen, with his knowing eyes and that hyper-prehensile eyebrow, plays Mathayus, the Arkadian. He's actually the last of the Arkadians, in a plot trope borrowed from James Fenimore Cooper, the Arkadians being a tribe of professional assassins that has fallen on hard times.
In fact, the known world, all 40 square miles of it, has fallen on hard times, with the Gomorrahians ascendant under the evil Memnon (Steven Brand), who rules with the power of his really bad haircut. The time is somewhere in the far past, after the invention of G-strings but before the invention of the brassiere -- yes, the golden age of man!
So it is that the few remaining free tribes -- I think they were Sumerians, Assyrians, Grammarians, Rastafarians, Rotarians and Episcopalians -- hire the Arkadian to kill not Memnon but his sorceress Cassandra, whose forecasting talents assure his soldiers of victory. She is played by blandly beautiful Kelly Hu behind makeup that must have been personally applied by Cher. More sadly still (curse that PG-13 rating), she is concealed from us by only that prototype G-string, plus two -- not seven -- veils. Alas, she never dances. Alas some more, she and the Rock never quite catch fire romantically, after he decides she's too beautiful to nail with an arrow and kidnaps her instead, sending the two of them, plus a fellow named Comedic Sidekick (Grant Heslov) into the desert with Memnon's minions in full pursuit. They try hard to bring off the classic Hollywood couple-on-the-run fireworks, but there's no fire and nothing works.
I hate to say this about a professional wrestler, but the Rock seems a bit grown up for all this foolishness. You keep expecting him to do something adult, like hit a Memnonite with a folding chair, or Figure 4 grapevine his booty. No such luck, a pity and a waste. On last week's "Saturday Night Live," the third-generation pro (born Dwayne Johnson) proved himself a talented light comedian and sketch player. He clearly got it, in a way that poor Cameron Diaz, a week earlier, didn't.
Yet this film does little with the Rock's unique persona; it's more concerned with his muscles. He uses the famous right eyebrow only once, for emphasis -- not nearly enough, because the vivid flexibility of that strange quasi-appendage is fascinating in and of itself. The movie never liberates the playful Rock, leaving him in a kind of nowheresville: It doesn't let him be ironic enough to play the thing for laughs, or earnest enough to play for keeps (and that PG-13 keeps the bloodletting way down from the gallonage that "Conan" spilled).
When Schwarzenegger played his violent wild one, Milius filled the film with Nietzschean grandeur and angst; the subtext, though gnarled and violent, made contact with that streak of romantic nihilism that runs through all teenage boys with pimples, dads who don't listen and pubic hair that won't grow fast enough. The movie connected with something, dark as it was.
"The Scorpion King" is shorn of this anguish. It's kind of a cheerful barbarian movie, a seeming contradiction in terms. That may be a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know. But it feels very much like barbarian lite, which is to say, it's nothing special at all.
The Scorpion King(87 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for mild, bloodless violence.
