The Scorpion King Review

Before he was making Jumanji movies and starring in every movie released in a the calendar year Dwayne Johnson was kicking butt in a wrestling ring. However tho I thought that for this review since I took a look at John Cena's film role it only makes sense to look at the first solo film starring his one time rival The Rock because for some reason people have forgotten that he's in this film and so here is my review of the 2002 film The Scorpion King.

The plot of the film is after seeing his brother killed at the hands of a ruthless king, Mathayus sets out to avenge his death and kill the ruthless dictator. In terms of actual plot that's really all there is so if anything it's more of a premise then an actual story but it is the closest thing to an actual plot coming from the remake Mummy franchise but at the same time I do wish that the story was a bit more creative and not just a by the books action film.

Making his debut in the leading role is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as Mathayus , Steven Brand as Memnon , Kelly Hu as Cassandra , Grant Heslov as Arpid , Bernard Hill as Philos , Michael Clarke Duncan as Balthazar , Peter Facinelli as Takmet , Ralf Moeller as Thorak , Branscombe Richmond as Jesup , Roger Rees as King Pheron , Sherri Howard as Queen Isis , Conrad Roberts as Chieftain and Joseph Ruskin as Tribal Leader.

In terms of what I thought about the acting it was a lot better then what I thought it was going to be and that's saying something. Since the acting in this film can at times be pretty bad especially from Grant Heslov who is just really annoying in my opinion as for Dwayne's performance he's not that good in this film but he's still better then most of the other actors and as we all know he's improve over the years.

This was the first film to be produced by WWF Entertainment which is now known as WWE Studios and yes I know that technically they produced No Holds Barred but that was under the name Shane Distribution Company. This tho was the first film to have the WWF name on it and it was actually produced by known control freak Vince McMahon and so given that Vince likes to control everything this must have been hell for him because he didn't have the final say on anything in this film in fact he was only producer because he owned the name The Rock which was used for marketing purposes so they had to include him in order to use the name.

I will admit that having The Rock be in your first feature film while it might not have been the WWE's then WWF's choice it's also a smart movie. Simply because at that alot more people knew the name The Rock more then they did Dwayne Johnson and it's weird because now it's the opposite alot more people know of Dwayne Johnson more then they do The Rock and given how popular The Rock was at that time so it made sense that he would get top billing.

One of the many issues that I have with this film is the fact that it's prequel and so that means it falls into the same traps that all prequels that feature the same character fall into. Since we know that Mathayus is going to succeed because he's one of the main bad guys in The Mummy Returns and so any kind of suspense that could have been built up is now lost because we know what the outcome is.

As is a tradition with these mummy films this film has a ton of bad CGI which for this film handled by CFX. Don't worry if you don't know what they've done I don't either and I don't want to know because the CGI in this film was pretty bad  even taking into account that this film came out in the early 2000's it's still bad the CGI in here looks like the kind of thing that you'd see in a Playstation game and not a feature film.

This film does kind of have a cool idea and it's with the character of Cassandra who can see the results of every battle. However the film does nothing with that idea and it does nothing with her character and so both her power and her character just seem pointless in the grand scheme of things since there is so much that could be done with both like how cool would it be to see our hero manipulate things in the final battle so that things go his way but nope the film chooses to do nothing with it and her.

Her character's only purpose is to be a love interest to our main hero and nothing more and that sucks because she could have been a cool character instead she's stuck in a badly done romance angle. Yeah for some reason there's a romance angle in this film and like I just said it's badly done I don't know why alot of action films choose to have romance plots thrown in since not alot of them this film included need them.

Now then since is an action film that does mean that we have to talk about the action that's in the film itself. I honestly feel that the action was the best thing about the film since it was so fun and so entertaining it's during these scenes where Dwayne really does get to shine mostly because of his wrestling background he can make every hit look good and more importantly look painful it's just a shame that the story isn't as good as the action.

Overall this was a pretty bad film and a fairly bad debut for the people's champ but as we all know he would go on to have a great career in hollywood. If anything this is the film that should have come out before The Mummy Returns since then not only would the suspense be there it also would have made The Mummy Returns more tragic because we know the character now as it is this film gets a 4.5 out of 10 from me.