The people have spoken: they prefer Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the
star of kiddie-skewing garbage. They want him neutered, thwarted,
wasted. They don’t want him to try.
And who is he to argue? After the failure of The Rundown, the unspeakable disaster of Southland Tales, and the $90 million success of The Game Plan,
Johnson has apparently decided to play it safe and give up on
respectability. His latest concession: signing on as the star of The Tooth Fairy, a Santa Clause-style comedy from Santa Clause 2 & 3 director Michael Lembeck. Johnson will play “an ordinary man who’s brought in to try to save the tooth fairy kingdom”. If Johnson’s an “ordinary man”, I’m Walter Hudson (and very, very gassy).
The
film is based on a screenplay by Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandell,
which makes me all nostalgic. Of course, they’ve been kinda off their
game for, oh, the last twenty years, but I’m often loyal to artists
who’ve attained greatness at least once in their careers – especially
if said greatness occurred during my childhood. And I love Ron
Howard’s something awful (“Name of the deceased: something Polish?”).
Too bad they’ve been rewritten by Joshua Sternin & Jeffrey
Ventimilia, who’ve contributed to television shows both awesome (Night ShiftThe Critic) and awful (That 70s Show).
Ironically,
Johnson probably would’ve been a huge movie star in the 1980s, when
Ganz & Mandell were two of the hottest scribes in town. Hell, with
his natural charisma, he might’ve been bigger than Stallone and
Schwarzenegger. Today, he’s Fred MacMurray on steroids.