Saw this tonight, and, hmmm. It was entertaining, but tremendously cliche-ridden, and it felt like a TV movie. It was a short ~100 minutes long, and it felt compelled to skip big chunks of time to get to the relatively unimpressive action scenes.
Really, when you guys watch it, how long does it take from The Rock’s return to the end? It’s gotta be several months. There are like 3 black-screen-a-month-passes scenes(and two montages), though at one point dialogue indicates that the writer forgot about that.
It’s always entertaining to see the little guy kick ass, and the Rock is a good lead, but yeesh. Not a lot of bang for your buck.
The Joe Don Baker version was based on a real guy. Having no desire to see the remake, I don’t know, but my guess would be they diverted even farther from the true story (given that it’s 21st-century cinema and all that) so they changed the character name.
Then again, after the pair of sequels and the 80s TV series, I’d imagine enough dramatic license has already been taken to last an eternity. So maybe this way his family doesn’t get any/as much money.
I saw this last night at a sneak and really enjoyed it.
There’s just something about The Rock that’s eminently watchable. He’s a perfectly good actor, and is able to switch effortlessly between “immensely likeable” and “immensely scary” as the scene demands. He’s just got bucketloads of charisma, and it’s evident here as it was with last year’s The Rundown. If he just continues to make good choices with material, he has a better shot than most at becoming the pre-eminent action star of the next decade.
There’s nothing in the film quite so impressive as The Rundown’s “rumble in the jungle” fight and the story does seem to wrap up rather abruptly, but the whole thing moves at a fast pace and never gets boring. For anybody who enjoys “payback” movies or likes to see The Rock whoop unholy amounts of bad-guy ass, this film doesn’t disappoint.
I really enjoyed Knoxville’s performance, too. I would have liked to have seen more of the comedic interplay between him and Rock – they had a good chemistry together.
But basically, any movie in which somebody shoots a bad guy point-blank with a pump-action shotgun and then enquires “Are you okay?” is a thumbs-up in my book.
I didn’t see the original, but I’d be keen to check it out. Even though they changed the name of The Rock’s character in this movie, at the end there’s a legend which reads “In Memory of Sheriff Buford Pusser.”
I ended up seeing Walking Tall (1hr 26minutes) after Hellboy (2hrs 12minutes).
Talk about a change of pace. I liked it Walking Tall alot. In some ways, it was better than Hellboy. Good casting across the board. Johnny Knoxville has some chops as an actor. He had really good chemistry with The Rock.
