April
26, 2002, 12:30 p.m. Rock
in Action
From
the ring to the silver screen.
By Matthew
Feeney
here's
something disconcerting about contemporary professional wrestling. In
the early glory days of the WWF, during the late 1980s, the camp antics
were staged with a reassuring crudeness. Characterization was very broad,
with rivalries built from cartoonized geopolitics — good guys like
Sergeant Slaughter (who later, inevitably, went bad) against bad guys
like the Soviet Army Colonel Nicolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheik (from
Eye-Ran); or from blunt sexual loathing — a gayish character named
Brutus Beefcake, who was an evil hairdresser or something. And, with the
exception of Rowdy Roddy Piper, there was very little that you could call
fine acting. A bright line separated the "marks," the people
who thought it was real, from the "smarts," the people who enjoyed
it in a sort of proto-postmodern irony. And, with a few exceptions, the
wrestlers were so cloddish you could almost believe they didn't know what
they were doing.
But as it dragged
on into the '90s, wrestling was forced to grow even more theatrical, which
meant that it became harder and harder not only to believe that it was
real, but to pretend to believe that anybody else could believe it was
real. Wrestling camp was threatening to consume itself, and promoters
like Vince McMahon responded by ratcheting down the camp and streamlining
the theatrics. Now, the WWF is a combination of Cirque du Soleil and action
movies. It no longer features an "international" cast of cartoon
characters. Instead, it is mostly just a bunch of extremely large, muscular,
bad-tempered guys highly sensitive about matters of personal honor and
surprisingly adept in the art of the angry monologue. But even as the
characters have become more, er, realistic, the wrestling has become more
elaborately, acrobatically staged — impressive, somehow, in its pointless
athleticism and physical daring. Wrestling turned itself into a more earnest
entertainment, which turned its audience into...what, exactly? Marks?
No, it's long past even pretending there are marks. Smarts? Not quite,
because the pleasures of being a smart disappeared when wrestling stopped
being so damn funny. The audience doesn't exactly believe, but
this earnest entertainment stuff wouldn't fly if they didn't, in some
way, suspend disbelief. Wrestling has become another, oddly respectable
branch of show business. Whether it's real is beside the point. What matters
is that it's on television. People know that it's fake, but they don't
seem to find this terribly ironic.
This is because,
above everything else, they want to be on television. MTV now has
a show in which real people train and try out to become pro-wrestlers.
Other people are videotaping themselves performing hair-raising elbow
drops from the roofs of their garages. Now that wrestling is fully, unabashedly
integrated into the entertainment industry, people take it more seriously
than ever. Oddly, the one wrestler who keeps the show at least partly
anchored in its absurdist past is its most popular performer — The
Rock (a.k.a. Dwayne Johnson). He's the one guy who's still "wrestling"
and not acting, the one guy who's still camping it up. (Well, the one
young guy. Hulk Hogan and Rick Flair, I'm pretty sure, show up
occasionally to toss themselves arthritically around the ring.)
This would seem to
make The Rock a perfect fit for The
Scorpion King, which is a prequel of sorts to The Mummy
and The Mummy Returns: It's set in ancient Egypt "five thousand
years ago," according to the production notes. Just as professional
wrestling has become more like action movies, the Mummy series
represents action movies becoming like old-style professional wrestling
— advertising their own campy foolishness. But, compared to the Iron
Sheik and Nikolai Volkoff, The Mummy's irony is toothless, merely
cute, and The Scorpion King doesn't entirely avoid this irritating
cuteness. The Rock is hard not to like, but he's a bit too goofy even
for movies like this. In a triumphant moment, the camera travels up his
mammoth, shiny, hairless body, but when it reaches his face, with his
bugging eyes and over-animated eyebrows, it's just funny — funnier
than the rest of the movie is supposed to be. This is even more distracting
because the story, at times, strains at a degree of seriousness about
things like the warrior ethos — "dying well" — that
is entirely absent from The Mummy.
As Mathayus, The
Rock is supposed to be a warrior and an assassin, and with his sheer physical
size you'd expect him to carry out these functions through straightforward
methods like conking people's heads together and crushing their throats
with his bare hands, but there's actually a fair amount of sneaking around
and swashbuckling. People toss makeshift weapons to each other at the
last minute and use curtains to swing from place to place. But there's
something a bit too heavy-footed, too muscle-bound about The Rock to carry
this off. In terms of physical acting, The Scorpion King is roughly
what Raiders of the Lost Ark would have been like if Indiana Jones
had been played by Lou Ferrigno instead of Harrison Ford. This problem
is made worse by director Chuck Russell, who is merely the latest action-movie
director to have no idea how to stage action. He zeroes in so closely
on his combatants it's like watching headless, armless, legless torsos
battle it out.
Along with The Rock,
Michael Clarke Duncan, the gigantic basso profundo from The
Green Mile, appears as Balthazar, a "Nubian" warrior who
joins forces with Mathayus against the tyrant Memnon. (Oh yeah, I forgot
to mention that they're battling the tyrant Memnon, played by Stephen
Brand, who has killed Mathayus's brother and who uses an enslaved sorceress
to help him conquer his rivals. That's pretty much the story.) Duncan
fares even less well than The Rock. The Nubian's huge face is supposed
to be riven with ceremonial warrior scars, but it just looks like several
fat pieces of pasta al dente got stuck to his cheeks and forehead
during last night's sloppy bacchanal. And in one combat scene, he crashes
through a wall wearing a clownish grimace that wouldn't have been out
of place in some jungle movie from the 1950s. If he had then grunted "Ooga
Booga," I wouldn't have been surprised.
And, as the beautiful
sorceress Cassandra, Kelly Hu is, well, beautiful. She does almost everything
in conspicuous semi-nakedness, with strands of hair draped just so.
There's a grim, lurid obsessiveness about this game of revealing/concealing,
and this element of joylessness and calculation seems to have infected
Hu. She stands about impassively, looking rather distracted and unhappy,
as if she, perhaps like the audience watching her, expected this exercise
to a lot more fun than it actually is.
—
Matthew Feeney is a freelance writer in Washington, DC.
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here's
something disconcerting about contemporary professional wrestling. In
the early glory days of the WWF, during the late 1980s, the camp antics
were staged with a reassuring crudeness. Characterization was very broad,
with rivalries built from cartoonized geopolitics — good guys like
Sergeant Slaughter (who later, inevitably, went bad) against bad guys
like the Soviet Army Colonel Nicolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheik (from
Eye-Ran); or from blunt sexual loathing — a gayish character named
Brutus Beefcake, who was an evil hairdresser or something. And, with the
exception of Rowdy Roddy Piper, there was very little that you could call
fine acting. A bright line separated the "marks," the people
who thought it was real, from the "smarts," the people who enjoyed
it in a sort of proto-postmodern irony. And, with a few exceptions, the
wrestlers were so cloddish you could almost believe they didn't know what
they were doing. 
