'The Rundown' Rocks

By Rory Sa

Beck (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) doesn’t give breaks.

He doesn’t care whose wife you’ve slept with, whom you borrowed money from or what football team you play for, even if it happens to be his favorite team. When crime boss Walker (William Lucking) tells him to retrieve something, Beck retrieves it, even if it means taking out an entire offensive line in the middle of a dance club.

Beck gives his targets two options:

Option A: They do whatever Beck says, and no one gets hurt.

Option B: Everyone gets hurt.

For some reason, most people don’t choose option A, giving Beck little choice but to beat his opponents into submission.

But Beck is more than hired muscle. He is a man with a goal: to get out of the retrieval business and open a small gourmet restaurant. “Nothing fancy,” Beck says, just a simple restaurant with 10 or 15 tables. But first he has to do one last thing for Walker—find and bring back Walker’s son.

Seann William Scott plays Walker’s reckless son, Travis, a would-be treasure hunter searching for an ancient artifact known as “El Gato Diablo.”

The first hint that Beck will earn every cent of his $250,000 bounty is a nerve-wracking ride in the flimsiest plane in all of Brazil, piloted by a clearly insane Scotsman named Declan (Ewen Bremner).

Beck’s next stop is the downtrodden mining town of El Dorado. A glance at the local mines is reminiscent of a scene from Exodus, with overburdened men and women bearing heavy sacks of gold, toiling under the watchful eyes and quick whips of the overseers and their unstable overlord, Hatcher (Christopher Walken). The inhabitants of El Dorado are little better than slaves, working in the deep pit that everyone, including Beck, describes as hell.

Abuse and manipulation mean little to Hatcher, who comments that many precious elements within the American dream are the result of his mine. “My hell for their little slice of heaven,” Hatcher says.

Finding Travis is not a problem. Getting him out of El Dorado is another thing. It seems that everyone wants a piece of the wealth Travis is on the verge of finding, including Hatcher, a group of rebels who wants to release the town from Hatcher’s stranglehold and Travis’ girlfriend, Mariana (Rosario Dawson).

Travis has no intention of going quietly back to Los Angeles. He never stops trying to ditch Beck, whether he’s driving their jeep off the side of a cliff into dense jungle or maliciously translating Beck’s pleas for mercy into the most inflammatory things he can think of. If Beck can survive booby-traps, desperate rebels and lonely howler monkeys, he just may be able to survive Hatcher’s army, Mariana’s machinations and Travis’ double-dealing.

The Rock does a great job as the reluctant Beck. Beck’s past is never fully explored, only hinted at throughout the movie. As the weary Beck, the Rock convincingly portrays the bounty hunter who may not care about his targets but has no interest in fighting, if he can avoid it. He also does his own stunts throughout the movie.

Scott plays an obnoxious smart-mouth who is as short on common sense as he is long in cunning. How can a guy who can read ancient native hieroglyphs and discover a thought-to-be-lost relic be stupid enough to think that running a jeep off the side of the road is an effective way to escape?

Walken steals the show as Hatcher, having some of the best lines in the entire movie including an anecdote about the tooth fairy, which then requires explaining to his men the basic concept of the tooth fairy.

There aren’t any surprises in the plot, with most of the twists visible from a mile away. But it doesn’t really matter. You know what’s going to happen, but you don’t care. It’s the journey, not the destination, that matters. And what a hilarious journey it is. Other than the strange presence of “Tarzan ju jitsu” masters in the middle of Brazil, the story flows smoothly.

Also, keep an eye out for one of California’s recall candidates in the first 10 minutes.

Guns, Bullwhips and howler monkeys—Life don’t get much better than this.