by CHRIS BARRY

Let’s get something straight right away: The Rundown is far from brilliant. Ain’t nobody gonna be confusing this for high art, nor writing their PhD thesis on the similarities of style between the Rock and Lionel Barrymore. But it’s a surprisingly fun movie, and the Rock possesses enough charisma that it’s easy to forgive his shortcomings in the acting department.

In this “action/comedy” the Rock plays a bounty hunter of sorts, working for an underworld kingpin who has sent him to the Amazon jungle to track down his son, an eccentric yet brilliant goofball played by real-life goofball Seann William Scott of American Pie fame. Scott has willfully disappeared while digging around the jungle zeroing in on El Gato, a sacred gold object everyone in the ’hood wants to get their hands on but are too stupid to find. Not the local guerrilla army, who want it so they can sell it and put the money back into the community, nor Christopher Walken, who plays the evil overseer of the neighbourhood slave labour camp and wants the icon for his own greedy purposes. It seems the whole jungle community is counting on master sleuth Scott to find El Gato so they can promptly bop him on the head and steal it from him. Everyone except the Rock that is, whose only concern is to get them both out of the jungle alive, return Scott to his father, and collect the $250,000 paycheque that will finally allow him to retire from the distasteful “human retrieval” business. But between the precocious Scott, various militia groups, one damn sexy female rebel commander (Rosario Dawson) and a pack of horny monkeys continually following the Rock around eager to introduce him to the joys of primate bum love, our hero soon discovers that this ain’t gonna be no easy assignment.

The Rundown is easily as over the top as any WWE extravaganza, but like the WWE, doesn’t take itself seriously, mercifully sparing us any of the bullshit moralizing so common to the action genre. As such, it ultimately succeeds in being a pretty fun way to kill a couple of hours.

The Rundown opens Friday, Sept. 26

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