Jungle hospitality

I decided I was going to treat Wednesday night as a "shut your brain off" night at the movies, and I thought my brain would be shut off quite nicely by The Rundown, a 2003 film by Peter Berg, one of the first star vehicles for Dwayne Johnson. (I thought it was the first, but then was reminded of his prior appearance in The Scorpion King, which I also had not seen.)

The version I watched on Netflix, though, had the international title in the movie itself, even if it had the U.S. title on the Netflix menu. That title was Welcome to the Jungle.

I found this particularly funny because it's not the only movie Johnson has made called, at least in part, Welcome to the Jungle.

As you may recall, the 2017 Jumanji reboot was called Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.

Guns N Roses are raking in royalties left and right.

It made me wonder if there are other actors who have appeared in two movies with (mostly) the same name that were not actually related to one another. I'm sure it has happened at some point. 

I also wonder if Johnson thought it was funny that they titled the Jumanji reboot this, or whether the international name for The Rundown may have actually factored into what to call the movie.

I also wonder why they thought The Rundown was not a suitable title for this movie in non-U.S. markets.

I'd hoped to derive more enjoyment than I did. For one, it looked really shitty. Whoever lit this movie and chose the film stock did a very poor job. 

It also felt pretty rough from Berg as a director. He's gotten a lot more polished since then, but this was the first action movie the former actor directed, having debuted as a director five years earlier with Very Bad Things (for which I have a soft spot). The action wirework is laughable. The way people fly around when kicked is ludicrous. 

Though he gains footing as he goes, Johnson also doesn't look that comfortable in this movie. His charisma does start to come out as it goes along -- which is not necessarily a case of gaining comfort, since movies are shot out of sequence -- but at the start it's pretty much non-existent.

Interestingly, I found that he seemed most comfortable in a comedic scene, in which he's been temporarily paralyzed due to a toxin in a jungle fruit, and he has to try to shoo a monkey away from the still paralyzed bodies of him and Seann William Scott. He and Scott not fully able to move their mouths, but still trying to get the monkey to get lost, was comedic gold, and previewed that Johnson really had a fitness for this sort of performance -- which he would continue to explore, notably in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and particularly in its sequel.

Also: It was funny to see he him when he had hair.

I was originally going to call this post "Two decades of Dwayne 'The Movie Star' Johnson," until I noted the earlier release dates of The Scorpion King. It's funny to think that he's been on screen for so long, because I still kind of thinking of him as transitioning from wrestling relatively recently. 

Yeah, and Mark Wahlberg was a rapper just yesterday too.