| Andrew NDB |
06-02-2015 02:25 AM |
Johnson's game plan has always been flawed. He's tried desperately to be the new Schwarzenegger in the whole time I was officially I was an adult and now, in 2015, he has only barely managed to achieve to be "cool guy who kind of saves franchises generally in a supporting role. And hey, in the new Shazam movie he may or may not be Black Adam but we'll just keep announcing it like it's a new thing every couple of years to make click-bait articles" status. Am I wrong? I really feel like I'm not.
Don't get me wrong. I love the guy. He's awesome. Even when I was like 17, I wrote him into my lame TMNT 4 script. He's got 100% more charisma than 90% of the working people in Hollywood today, but he really only suits certain roles. He was the reason I got into WWE when I was a kid, when he was beefing with HHH and Stephanie and all of that... and I loudly applauded his rising up in Mummy 2 and Scorpion King and all that. He's always entertaining to watch. To me. That said, it's always seemed to me he's approached his career in reverse.
I mean, when you really hold things back in retrospect, how the biggest popcorn, larger than life action icons became icons in the age of unfiltered machismo (Arnold, Sly, Kurt, Seagal, Van Damme, etc.) when that was a thing that was allowed to be without "100 Moms" becoming a winning vote in anything... there's an order to it. An art? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly a method. You know, you come out guns blazing with Terminator. Made. Then you do a slew of adults-pleasing movies to cement your image (Conan the Barbarian, Running Man, Red Heat, Predator, Commando, etc.)... and THEN, only then you get to be able to make fun of the image you've already created, ala Kindergarten Cop, Junior, Twins, and so on. Not before. You don't do it right out of the gate (not unless you want to just kill everything you've been trying to accomplish). Dwayne Johnson seemed to want too much too fast and was like, "F*** that, I'm just gonna skip past the whole part of making myself a badass on screen for a stint and skip straight to my Kindergarten Cop phase because there's this script and they wanna pay me 3 million right now and that's tight"... well, that's up to you, buddy, but it's not going to be earned, everyone's going to see that it's not, and it's going to cost you and prevent you from ever even hitting that initial Schwarzenegger badass phase of success and it'll be the equivalent of perpetually walking around with a house arrest anklet. But it's your funeral, buddy.
I did love the movie Faster with Dwayne. I could watch that over and over. Truly slick. That deserved to do far better than it did. Maybe that's a result of Dwayne preceding it with sh*t like Tooth Fairy when he never did what I just illustrated before it. Because it wasn't earned in the public eye.
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