The Scorpion King
Director: Chuck Russell
IMDB link

In The Rock's first real motion picture role (we can't really count five minutes of non-English acting and a huge helping of CG), The Scorpion King, he delivers an entertaining performance in what otherwise might be a weak movie.

The People's Champion plays the role of the assassin Mathayus, one of the last remaining Akkadians who is hired to kill the sorcerer of the warlord Memnon (Steven Brand). The sorcerer turns out to be a beautiful sorceress (Kelly Hu), who makes our hero pause long enough to be ambushed, courtesy of the son of the man who hired him in the first place (Peter Facinelli). Memnon kills Mathayus's brother and co-assassin (Branscombe Richmond), but Mathayus eventually escapes his own execution thanks to a "prediction" from the sorceress and the help of a horse thief named Arpid (Grant Heslov).

Given the campy premise, The Rock and Heslov deliver (intentionally) funny performances-- indeed, The Rock's first scene ends on a humorous note. Heslov provides a lot of comedic relief, particularly when interacting with The Rock (on one scene, interacting with Rock's fist). Other sources of comedy and campy friction come from Balthazar (Michael Clarke Duncan), the nubian leader, and the street urchin (Yuki Tokuhiro) who steals Mathayus's money and later shows him into Memnon's palace. However, all of the humor element, like the rest of the movie, is around Mathayus. They only exist - for the most part - to make him "larger than life". No other character is independent from the story of Mathayus, except perhaps Memnon.

The way that the fight sequences are choreographed are reminiscent of both the old Conan movies (albeit more modern and with the level of Asian fighting style that being "modern" comes with, still the same level of carnage and mass combat) and the Indiana Jones movies (with how many of the fight scenes had a large dose of comedy mixed in). At times more of one shows than the other, but The Scorpion King is like a bi-polar union of the two styles. Even the plot shows this, with one scene being campy funny, and the next with brutal violence. The writers and director sometimes seem unable to decide what kind of movie it is, and the constant back-and-forth makes it look like they might be in need of a thorazine drip...

...Except that it works. This movie took the recipes that made these kind of movies great in yesteryear, and proved that audiences still want the movies where the hero is witty, comedic, seductive, and only vulnerable when it's not terribly inconvenient. And yes ladies, this is the kind of "glistening man-god" hero that you'll find in your romance novels (hell, apparently he posed for some romance novel covers during the shoot for more money). Men will want to kick ass like him. Women will want him to kick ass in their name.

One issue that this movie does have is that the hero's ending, which is necessary for this type of movie. It does not jive with what we know from The Mummy Returns. This isn't much of a problem-- we are not watching this movie because of its historical accuracy, nor do we care that it breaks the continuity of some epic saga. The Scorpion King is an enjoyable flick. Just don't go in expecting a masterpiece on par with Shakespearean (or even Fight Clubbean) levels and you'll be well entertained.

At least the movie is not in "Ancient Egyptian" with English subtitles.