Why We Need More Dwayne Johnson Performances Like Southland Tales

2020 was an unprecedented movie year in countless ways, and one anomaly to count among others was the lack of a new movie from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Often cited as Hollywood’s hardest working man, Johnson reliably opens at least something every year, and is one of the few remaining movie stars that can generate a crowd based on his name alone.

Johnson is the ideal action star, but with a few exceptions, he’s reliably stayed within his comfort zone as the gruff, charismatic lead whose killer grin is usually followed by a ridiculous one-liner. While roles in Central Intelligence and the rebooted Jumanji franchise have allowed Johnson to subvert his usual roles with some self-aware comedy and he’s occasionally taken on darker fare like Snitch, they still retain his inherent natural talents and don’t stray too far out of his comfort zone.

Even if slightly riskier roles as a meathead criminal in Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain or an animated musical role in Moana asked him to do a little bit more, Johnson has yet to take the bold swings that action stars like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Bruce Willis took when they worked with established auteurs and gave more experimental performances. The fact that Johnson has remained in his lane so consistently makes it even more ironic that he began his career with a wildly idiosyncratic performance in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, a hallucinatory dystopian satire of Bush-era anxieties that has transformed from a notorious festival bomb to a cult classic in the fifteen years since its release.

Kelly had gained considerable acclaim for his breakout debut Donnie Darko. Unlike today’s system which would’ve immediately snatched up the indie filmmaker and proposed him as a hired gun for a tentpole franchise or comic book movie, Kelly was granted a studio budget to create his dream project. Southland Tales is a wild takedown of the military-industrial complex, celebrity culture, corporate synergy, and political divisions that’s complicated by a rift in the timeline that gives several characters doppelgangers.

At first dismissed as a pseudo-Mulholland Drive that wasn’t quite funny enough to be a satire or focused enough to operate as a narrative, Southland Tales has emerged as a biting and at times prophetic examination of American ugliness. It’s messy, easy to mock, and ultimately terrifying, and the film’s madcap take on national collapse only resonates deeper within the Trump era. Kelly has been active recently in talking about the film’s changed reputation, and recently sat down with Collider’s Gregory Lawrence for a lengthy discussion about the film’s legacy, including its impact on Johnson’s career.

RELATED: Richard Kelly Unpacks ‘Southland Tales’, From The Rock’s Fingers to That Infamous Cannes Screening

The cast is littered with eclectic names including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sean William Scott, Justin Timberlake, and several Saturday Night Live alumni in cameo roles, but at the center of the elaborate narrative is Johnson as Boxer Santaros, an amnesiac action movie star with ties to the Republican Party that becomes involved with a neo-Marxist movement to take down the national surveillance state. Although the premise suggests that Johnson’s role would be the first of many self-aware, yet standard action parts, Santaros is unlike any character he had ever done before or anything he’s attempted since.

Santaros may have been a film star not dissimilar from Johnson himself, but the memory loss renders him a perpetually nervous, oddly self-serious buffoon obsessed with destiny. In a film that’s often best understood in multiple layers of irony, Johnson is weirdly sincere, unafraid to be the butt of a joke as Sataros is positioned as a chess piece in a war between radical revolutionaries and the oppressive conservative regime. When Southland Tales aims at profound meditation, it’s Santatros’s words that lead the hypnotic chaos.

In 2006, Johnson had only recently departed from his WWE persona to pursue a film career. While breakout roles in The Mummy Returns and The Rundown signified that he was someone to watch, he hadn’t yet established himself as the king of broad entertainment thanks to bombs such as Doom, Be Cool, and Walking Tall. Southland Tales wasn’t another popcorn flick aimed at a general audience- it was an ambitious science fiction project from a respected up-and-comer that would seemingly shed Johnson’s wrestling persona and establish him as a serious actor with the range to take on challenging parts.

And Southland Tales certainly would be a challenge to any actor; when a line like “I’m a pimp, and pimps don’t commit suicide” is merely a trailer tag, you can all that guarantee that the 144 minute film is far stranger. Kelly’s bizarre dialogue required Johnson to deal with complex philosophical concepts about memory and identity, all while balancing the references to a story so jam-packed it takes a comic book prequel saga to understand on even the most basic level.

It’s also a hard role to pin down because Santaros’s position within the story keeps changing. Is he an audience avatar for this strange world, or a searing caricature of what Americans want from their superstars? Is he the centerpiece of this apocalyptic reckoning, or merely an observer caught within this specific snapshot? Is he intended to be sympathetic, or repulsively dim? Like everything in Southland Tales, it’s never entirely clear.

Your opinion of the film itself most likely corresponds with your evaluation of Johnson’s performance, and for my money he’s pretty great. The nervous ticks and odd word emphasis feel more in line with someone like Jim Carrey or even early Dustin Hoffman, but Johnson’s physicality and uncomfortability with character roles give the film a whole different energy. Kelly has frequently stated that he wanted to get his cast to work outside their comfort zones, but Johnson transcends any supposed stunt casting to deliver some delightful zaninees.

Again, like everything in Southland Tales, it’s impossible to not at least admire Johnson’s commitment, and unfortunately it’s the type of role that’s been buried within his plethora of success. There are few people quite as charismatic as Johnson and I certainly wouldn’t want to stop seeing him in summer blockbusters (he has the unique ability to both save dying franchises and make bad movies watchable), but a guy who has a maximum number of defeats he can have on screen could also stand to take a few risks now and then.

May 21st marks the 15th anniversary since Southland Tales debuted at the Cannes Film Festival to what is often cited as the most disastrous premiere in the festival’s history. Cannes is no stranger to booing films destined to be classics (Taxi Driver and The Tree of Life to name just a few), but Roger Ebert described himself as “dazed, confused, bewildered, bored, affronted and deafened by the boos all around me.” The novelty of the animosity directed at the film may have only bolstered its cult status over the years as the storied director’s cut was finally released this January, but it’s arc is often squarely framed in its impact on Kelly and not Johnson.

Perhaps this was only ever a one-time experiment on Johnson’s part or maybe the experience scared him off from anything even remotely similar, but it would be fascinating to see him grant his star power to a comparable offbeat role. We all know what The Rock is good at, but it’s more interesting to see him bite off more than he can chew.

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