You've missed Dwayne Johnson's best performance in years
His box office domination might be a thing of the past, but Dwayne Johnson's return to form has to be respected. Elsewhere, reviews of Monkey Man and Netflix drama Scoop.
We’re doing something a little bit different this week, leading with an essay about how Dwayne Johnson has found his mojo again. The usual reviews and business can be found below.
Dwayne Johnson’s best performance makes Black Adam look like a top bloke
In the second half of the 2010s, Dwayne Johnson was inescapable. It’s impossible to overstate how enormous his star was in Hollywood, having earned his reputation as “franchise viagra” and become the go-to guy for big, dumb action blockbusters and glossy comedies. He topped the Forbes list of highest-paid actors in 2016, 2019, 2020, and 2021 and would’ve reached the summit in 2018 too had George Clooney not sold his tequila company.
But since the pandemic, his star has dipped somewhat. There were mixed reviews for Jungle Cruise and Red Notice before everything really crashed down to earth with one of the worst blockbusters of the superhero boom: 2022’s Black Adam. It’s fair to say Johnson took the movie’s abject failure very poorly, ranting on social media about box office numbers and audience scores.
Since then, the unstoppable momentum of Johnson’s acting career has stalled. It has now been a very long time since he gave a genuinely memorable performance on the big screen. But in March, he changed all of that with five minutes of truly incredible television. Unless you’re a regular WWE viewer, you probably haven’t seen it.
Let’s do some backstory to explain why all of this is so special. By virtue of its continuous storytelling and semi-improvised nature, wrestling has a habit of weaving a tangled web.
On the first episode of WWE RAW of 2024, Johnson made a triumphant return to TV as The Rock. He concluded his 20-minute masterclass of crowd work with a clear statement of intent, directly calling out his cousin — the current WWE Champion Roman Reigns. Reigns has held the title for more than three years, making him the most dominant champ since the 1980s. He has presided over a team made up of his toughest family members known as The Bloodline, with Reigns positioned as “the head of the table”.
WWE has been trying to make Reigns happen as the top guy for well over a decade — it’s now working after years of going about as well as “fetch” did for Gretchen — and, for that whole time, pretty much everyone has assumed that Roman Reigns vs. The Rock will be a WrestleMania main event one day. When The Rock delivered that promo, the stage appeared set for this year’s 40th edition of ‘Mania. Rock vs. Reigns was a go.
However, as often happens with wrestling, the fans said otherwise. At last year’s WrestleMania, fan-favourite Cody Rhodes very nearly beat Reigns and there was an outpouring of outrage when he didn’t. Then, he won this year’s Royal Rumble and earned himself a chance to fight for a world championship at WrestleMania.
In a bizarre SmackDown segment in February, Rhodes decided to face the other world champion in the company, Seth Rollins, seemingly introducing The Rock as his hand-picked opponent for Reigns. It was weird and made no sense, triggering an enormous social media campaign to get Rhodes back into the match, allowing him to fulfil the promise he had made to “finish the story” and dethrone Reigns.
A week later, at WWE’s splashy WrestleMania Kick-Off show, WWE changed course. In a chaotic skit, Rhodes decided to change his mind and challenge Reigns, while The Rock “turned heel” and became a foul-mouthed, entitled villain cursing the “Cody cry-babies” who had ruined the planned blockbuster match. He aligned himself with his family and, in a later TV segment, submitted to Reigns as the head of the table.
The Rock will now team with Reigns on the first night of WrestleMania this Saturday to face Rhodes and Rollins. If the good guys win, Rhodes will go up against Reigns for the title on Sunday in a fair fight. If, however, the cousins emerge victorious, the title match will happen under “Bloodline Rules”, in which anything goes. Rhodes, it’s fair to say, would be outnumbered and disadvantaged.
Since this booking change, Johnson has delivered what can only be called a masterclass in professional wrestling storytelling. He has pushed the boundaries of WWE’s restrictive TV-PG rating, routinely swearing during his live segments and embracing the kind of adult material many WWE fans haven’t seen since the Attitude Era of the 1990s.
But the most impressive thing is that we’ve seen every different facet of The Rock during this period. We’ve seen him do his catchphrases. We’ve seen him run down local sports teams and the people of every city in which he has appeared. It’s classic wrestling heel stuff — known as “getting cheap heat”. He also played to his comedy chops with an appearance in which he sung a blues-inspired diss track. It’s the hottest musical moment since Beyoncé covered Jolene.
The closer we’ve got to WrestleMania, though, the more The Rock has done something different and impressive. He has accentuated his enormous physical bulk alongside the leaner Rhodes, carrying himself with a genuinely imposing and formidable gait. He has dubbed himself “the final boss” and positioned himself as the ultimate enforcer — the last line of defence for The Bloodline’s wrestling business supremacy.
He has incorporated his real world status as a board member of WWE’s parent company TKO into the storyline as well, as well as nodding at his own wholesome reputation as the voice actor behind Maui in Moana. He has even played in videos of children crying while watching his attacks on Rhodes. There are no punches being pulled here. Well, except for the ones in the ring. This is pro wrestling after all.
This all culminated on the 25th March episode of RAW. The Rock made a cryptic and wordless appearance to whisper something into Rhodes’ ear and then resurfaced in the closing moments of the show. He destroyed Rhodes in a one-sided beating, trash-talking towards Rhodes and into the camera as he battered his ‘Mania opponent into the parking lot, helped by an atmospheric downpour of rain — as if the Chicago weather was auditioning for a role in the next John Wick film.
The Rock then made good on a promise he had delivered on a previous episode. He had directly addressed Rhodes’ mother, promising that her son’s blood would be smeared on his weight belt, which he would then deliver to her. The practice of intentional bleeding — usually done by making a small cut above the eyebrow with a concealed razor blade — has been outlawed in WWE since 2008, so it is very rare to see blood on the company’s programming. However, this segment concluded with Rhodes wearing the proverbial “crimson mask”.
The message was clear. This rivalry is more violent, more personal, and higher-stakes than anything WWE has done in years.
In video subsequently shared by WWE, The Rock continued the beating even after being told that the broadcast had gone off the air. It’s one of those joyous little tricks only wrestling can do given its unusual relationship with reality. Dwayne Johnson was told that the show was over, but The Rock saw no reason to end his violence just because of arbitrary TV timeslots. “Just because the show’s over doesn’t mean that this stops,” he yelled.
Cody Rhodes will almost certainly leave WrestleMania as WWE Champion, potentially as a result of a schism between The Rock and Reigns. It seems very likely we’ll get that clash of the cousins before the year is out, whether there’s a title on the line or not. But regardless of the final result, we’ve been given the chance to witness one of the greatest wrestling performers of all time at the peak of his powers once again.
More than that, though, it’s a reminder of how versatile Dwayne Johnson truly is. We’ve seen him as the larky good guy or the taciturn badass on screen so many times over the last decade, but it’s tough to recall the last time we saw him transform into something as purely malevolent and utterly compelling as The Final Boss has proven to be.
Hopefully he’ll be able to parlay this into his upcoming film work like… the Moana sequel and a Christmas comedy. Well shit.
Dev Patel definitely prefers John Wick to James Bond
Dev Patel knows his debut feature as writer-director, Monkey Man, will be compared to John Wick. In fact, he’s so sure of it that his film makes the reference explicitly itself. Unfortunately, many of the lessons Patel has learned from Wick don’t quite work in his own debut.
What does work is his lead performance, all rock-hard abs and moody hair as an unnamed young man in India on a quest for revenge against the crooked police chief who destroyed his home and murdered his mother. He throws himself bullishly into the intensely physical fight sequences, complete with some gleefully gruesome innovations involving what you can do with a knife in your teeth.
Unfortunately, Patel the director is not operating on the same level. The action is exciting and innovative, but you can’t see any of it because the camera is always ricocheting wildly like it’s been put in a blender inside a washing machine. When your fights are as clever as this, why not make it easier to see them?
Monkey Man is great at tone, evoking a scuzzy and corrupt underworld brilliantly. But often that vibe is all it has — an exercise in style over substance. A middle section journey to a community of marginalised transgender people gives a fascinating glimpse at a world beyond the neon-lit bars and raucous fight clubs that are the stock in trade of the genre, but it’s a brief sojourn. Elsewhere, we find ourselves mired in cliché.
This is a terrific showcase for Dev Patel the actor and sits a world away from the comic charm of his regular oeuvre. But it also shows that Patel the director is still raw. All that said, though, there’s plenty of style and flair on offer here — more than enough to imply that his future forays behind the camera could be very special indeed.
Netflix drama Scoop fails to break any news
How soon is too soon for a movie like Scoop? It tells the story of how the BBC’s Newsnight secured the only interview with Prince Andrew about his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in the wake of Epstein’s death while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. That interview aired in November 2019 and its greatest hits — Pizza Express Woking, inability to sweat, etc — are now firmly embedded in our culture.
In an attempt to tell us something new, Scoop ostensibly frames the story through the eyes of Newsnight producer Sam McAlister (Billie Piper), whose work made the interview happen. Peter Moffat’s script is based on her book, though the movie shows almost no interest in exploring McAlister as an actual character and shows her attempts to secure the Duke of York (Rufus Sewell) as being more frictionless than I ever assumed they would have been.
Compared to the dogged work of journalists in remarkable recent movies like Spotlight and She Said, this take on the story seems to suggest that McAlister just needed to have a few glasses of wine with the Duke’s private secretary (Keeley Hawes). It rather does the real woman’s work a disservice in that respect, as I have no doubt that the process of getting this interview was complex, sensitive, and required immense powers of negotiation.
Scoop is interested only in the actual face-off between the prince and presenter Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), described as “like a gunfight in a Western”. Much of the movie’s second half is taken up by Anderson and Sewell doing a decent karaoke of the interview, but it all feels very perfunctory. Why do we need this dramatised? We all watched it at the time. We’ve all seen clips since. We can watch the whole thing on YouTube whenever we want.
This is a drama desperately in search of a raison d'être. Certainly, we don’t get insight into the people behind it. Maitlis is portrayed dully as a flawless journalistic savant, while McAlister’s apparent struggles with her co-workers ring hollow because we know she will ultimately succeed. Only Sewell’s surprisingly grotesque portrayal of the Duke shows us anything we haven’t seen before, and even that basically just fills in the gaps between the Twitter abuse.
Scoop is glossy and competently made, but it feels empty and entirely lacking in any sort of revelation. Depressingly, there’s also a three-part Prime Video series on the way. It simply has to be more interesting than this.
The ultimate theatre critic
Quentin Dupieux has given us some fascinating stuff over the years, from a killer tyre to a love affair with a deerskin jacket and whatever the heck was happening in Smoking Causes Coughing. His latest slice of French absurdity is more accessible, but no less inventive. Yannick’s opening set piece is a simple bit of wish fulfilment. What if you just stood up in the middle of a crap bit of theatre and told the actors exactly what you thought of it?
That’s exactly what the title character here (Raphaël Quenard) does and, after a fun back-and-forth between stalls and stage about the subjective nature of art, he leaves the auditorium. But this is a Dupieux movie and so that’s far from the end. Soon, he’s back with a gun and an eccentric demand — he wants to write them a better play and force them to perform it right there and then.
Quenard is fantastic in the lead role, revelling in the clash between the snooty actors and his working-class take on their pretentious performances, right up until the surprisingly poignant ending. In one particularly solid gag, he suggests that forcing audiences to sit through a terrible performance is no different to holding them hostage. He kinda has a point.
At just over an hour long, this is a brief, breezy, and deeply silly single-location comedy with a late in the day burst of welcome heart. Yannick is available to stream now via Mubi and, presumably, Dupieux won’t mind you heckling the screen if you’re not entertained. But let’s face it, you will be.
That’s it for this week. Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed the longer essay format, as it might be something I do more often if so. Back with more reviews and hot takes next time out!