Well, here's the deal – we have the film beginning on the last day of high school where Calvin Joyner is voted to the student most likely to succeed, while Bob Stone (not his real name) is in the shower dancing. Stone is then grabbed by some bullies, naked, and thrown into the middle of the gym, where all the school is watching. Everybody, but Joyner, is laughing at Stone, however Joyner gives Stone his jacket, and that is basically the last anybody hears of him.
Twenty years later Joyner married his highschool sweetheart and is working in a dead end job at an accounting firm with an inflatable gorilla out the front. The idea of him succeeding seems to have fallen flat on its face, particularly when he found himself in the real world. However he receives an anonymous friend request on Facebook and discovers that it is his old friend from school, however he has changed – a lot. Instead of the fat kid he remembered he is now and incredibly muscly, yet still very nice, Dwayne Johnson. Stone is actually needing some assistance, which Joyner gives him, and it soon becomes apparent that Stone is a rouge CIA agent, and Joyner is now caught up in a mission to save the United States, which includes a huge machine gun fight in his office.
So, that is basically the movie – it's funny in parts, but the comedy pretty quickly wears off to become not so much your typical spy action movie, but rather a somewhat unbelievable spy action movie. When I left the cinema I thought to myself – yes, this was a good film, however as I thought about it (though not too much, because there is nothing all that much to think about) I realised that there really wasn't anything all that special about it. While Johnson's character wasn't bad, or irritating, he just seemed to be a little too nice, to the point that I didn't feel that there was all that much depth to the character. Sure, there were some amusing scenes, but it wasn't a side splitting funny type of movie.
I guess it is basically one of those 'life didn't quite turn out as we expected' type of movies – the ones where at the end of highschool it seems as if the world is your oyster, but twenty years down the track all the potential that was there when we were young seems to not only have gone, but has been wasted. In fact Joyner doesn't even want to attend his reunion (I know what it is like – I didn't, despite the fact that Facebook as allowed me to connect with my old school friends) because he feels that the expectation that was there were he was left has been wasted. Mind you, it is also one of those 'wouldn't it be good' type of movies – the ones that suggest that it would be good if something were to just suddenly happen to take the monotony out of life.
Even though it was enjoyable, and I would hardly call it boring, it seems to suffer from the malaise that many of the Hollywood movies seem to be suffering from these days – lack of depth. Oh, and it is also predictable as well – I worked out that there was a purpose for the giant inflatable gorilla almost as soon as I saw it.
Twenty years later Joyner married his highschool sweetheart and is working in a dead end job at an accounting firm with an inflatable gorilla out the front. The idea of him succeeding seems to have fallen flat on its face, particularly when he found himself in the real world. However he receives an anonymous friend request on Facebook and discovers that it is his old friend from school, however he has changed – a lot. Instead of the fat kid he remembered he is now and incredibly muscly, yet still very nice, Dwayne Johnson. Stone is actually needing some assistance, which Joyner gives him, and it soon becomes apparent that Stone is a rouge CIA agent, and Joyner is now caught up in a mission to save the United States, which includes a huge machine gun fight in his office.
So, that is basically the movie – it's funny in parts, but the comedy pretty quickly wears off to become not so much your typical spy action movie, but rather a somewhat unbelievable spy action movie. When I left the cinema I thought to myself – yes, this was a good film, however as I thought about it (though not too much, because there is nothing all that much to think about) I realised that there really wasn't anything all that special about it. While Johnson's character wasn't bad, or irritating, he just seemed to be a little too nice, to the point that I didn't feel that there was all that much depth to the character. Sure, there were some amusing scenes, but it wasn't a side splitting funny type of movie.
I guess it is basically one of those 'life didn't quite turn out as we expected' type of movies – the ones where at the end of highschool it seems as if the world is your oyster, but twenty years down the track all the potential that was there when we were young seems to not only have gone, but has been wasted. In fact Joyner doesn't even want to attend his reunion (I know what it is like – I didn't, despite the fact that Facebook as allowed me to connect with my old school friends) because he feels that the expectation that was there were he was left has been wasted. Mind you, it is also one of those 'wouldn't it be good' type of movies – the ones that suggest that it would be good if something were to just suddenly happen to take the monotony out of life.
Even though it was enjoyable, and I would hardly call it boring, it seems to suffer from the malaise that many of the Hollywood movies seem to be suffering from these days – lack of depth. Oh, and it is also predictable as well – I worked out that there was a purpose for the giant inflatable gorilla almost as soon as I saw it.