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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.