Movie Review Gridiron Gang

Gridiron Gang (2006) 

Directed by Phil Joanou

Written by Jeff Maguire

Starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Xhibit, Leon Rippy, Kevin Dunn

Release Date September 15th, 2006

Published September 14th, 2006

Gridiron Gang is yet another formula sports flick with all of the beats, lyrics and tear jerker elements the genre is known for. So how does it manage to be better than most similar formula sports flicks? It's all about the star power. Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson is a rising star whose massive wrestlers frame is matched by a thousand watt smile, a self deprecating sense of humor, and the kind of charm only seen in the biggest movie stars. The Rock's presence turns the simplistic, slightly tacky, recycled plot of Gridiron Gang into an inviting, entertaining piece of formula filmmaking.

At Camp Kilpatrick, on the outskirts of affluent Malibu, California, guard Sean Porter (The Rock) is fighting a losing battle. Year after year he watches in futility as his teenage prisoners repeat the mistakes that got them to Camp Kilpatrick after they get released. Kilpatrick is a youth facility where criminal teens kill time till they turn 18 and are returned to the street. The stats say that nearly 80 percent of the kids released from Kilpatrick will either find themselves in adult prisons or dead.

One day, as Porter is visiting his sick mother, he passes a High School football practice and is struck with a slightly crazy idea. He thinks he can start a football team at Camp Kilpatrick. In pitching the idea to his boss, Paul Higa (Leon Rippy), Porter points out that the problems these kids have with discipline and working well with others can be addressed by playing football.

Higa is dubious but allows Porter and fellow guard Malcolm Moore (rapper Xzibit) to go ahead with forming a team. Porter takes it a step further by approaching a league of Christian High Schools about allowing the newly formed Kilpatrick Mustangs to play a full schedule of games in their league. Can he get the team to come together in a very short time? Can he get these mostly gang affiliated criminals to put aside their street affiliations and play as a team? These are the questions that drive the plot of Gridiron Gang.

Gridiron Gang is based on a television documentary from the husband and wife team of Lee and Linda Stanley who discovered the story of Sean Porter while researching a documentary on juvenile detention facilities. The story they discovered was one of the few true success stories in the often heart rending system of juvenile detention. As the film explains, the football program at Camp Kilpatrick managed to help 75% of the kids who played on that team to avoid returning to their criminal ways after leaving the camp. That is an extraordinary accomplishment, worthy of having made a movie about it.

Director Phil Joanou, best known for his work on some innovative U2 music videos, brings a documentary feel to Gridiron Gang. The aesthetic is often difficult to square with football scenes that go right inside the huddle and on the field (places where obviously documentary cameras could not go) but it is nevertheless an eye capturing visual approach that does work in non-football scenes.

The most important element of Gridiron Gang however, is the lead performance of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson. The former WWE superstar is an imposing physical presence, more than filling the intimidating presence of a prison guard, but it is his charm that really makes this role so surprising and entertaining. Coming from the often meat headed world of professional wrestling; it is quite extraordinary to find someone like The Rock with such natural charisma, presence and talent.

Rather than just be intimidating The Rock also shines in his dramatic scenes in Gridiron Gang. The Rock has a natural rapport with his young co-stars and their obvious admiration for him comes through in their performances. Amongst the strong group of young actors Jade Yorker stands out as Willie Weathers a roughneck young gangster who lost his cousin in a drive by and lives for the chance at revenge. Forced to play football with members of the rival gang involved in his cousins death, Willie becomes a difficult charge. His transformation is slow and painful and the film makes good use of this dramatic device.

I've said it before and I will say it again; there is nothing wrong with formula filmmaking. The key is how the formula is applied. The creators of Gridiron Gang apply this formula with eye catching documentary style camerawork and most importantly; by taking advantage of the star power and charisma of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson. The Rock is a true star in the making whose obvious physicality is made even more impressive by his jovial expressiveness and terrific sense of humor. The Rock raises the formula of Gridiron Gang from typical to entertaining.

Movie Review: Fighting With My Family

Fighting with My Family (2019) 

Directed by Stephen Merchant

Written by Stephen Merchant 

Starring Florence Pugh, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Lena Headey, Nick Frost, Jack Lowden

Release Date February 14th, 2019 

Published February 13th, 2019 

As a longtime fan of the WWE I have known Saraya Knight from her earliest days in wrestling’s big leagues. I saw her win the very first NXT Women’s Championship. I watched live when she debuted on Monday Night Raw and won what was then called the WWE Divas Championship. I was also there when injuries and scandal nearly ended her career. Finally, I was there when she broke her neck and was forced to retire at the far too young age of 25. 

Saraya ‘Paige’ Knight has lived multitudes in her 26 years beginning her wrestling career at age 12 in Norwich, England, working for her mother and father’s very own promotion, WAW. As the story goes in real life and in the new movie on Paige’s life, Fighting with My Family, she never wanted to wrestle as a kid, that was her brother Zak’s thing. Once in the ring however, things changed and she fell in love with the business and began regularly wrestling against her mother, a successful wrestler in England for many years. 

Florence Pugh portrays Paige in Fighting with My Family. We watch as she wrestles against her parents all the while she and her brother Zac (Jack Lowdon) dream of getting a call from the WWE. That call comes when Paige is a mere 18 years old. Paige and Zac are invited to a WWE tryout while the WWE is in London in 2012. A trainer played by Vince Vaughn as an amalgam of many of WWE’s trainers over the years, named in the movie as Hutch Morgan, decides that only Paige has what it takes to go on to WWE’s Developmental system. 

This drives a wedge between Paige and Zac who had always been very close until this happened. Nevertheless, Paige accepts the chance to join the WWE and move away from her family to Florida where the fish out of water portion of the movie begins. Paige is not the prototypical WWE Diva. She’s up against models and athletes who didn’t grow up in the industry but were brought into it, the movie implies briefly, because of their looks. 

Part of Paige’s journey, surprisingly, is coming to respect the leggy blondes who are initially her antagonists. This is a welcome inversion of the classic trope. Our outsider hero has a journey here that is not as straightforward and heroic as it would initially seem. Fighting with My Family was directed by actor-comedian and writer Stephen Merchant, a rather brilliant comic mind who does well tapping both his comic and dramatic skills in Fighting with My Family. 

Fighting with My Family is not a serious movie by any stretch but it is grounded in a way that allows for the broad humor of wrestling to stand out against the mundane regular world. The juxtaposition between the broad and strange world of professional wrestling and the regular world outside of wrestling plays well for the most part, aside from characters played by the director himself and Julia Davis who play stock characters, whitebred outsiders who look down on the low culture of wrestling.

There is plenty to enjoy about Fighting with My Family including the wonderful supporting performances of Nick Frost and Lena Headey as Paige’s parents. These are wonderful actors playing wonderful characters. Frost and Headey appear to bring lifetimes to these two characters that we never see and yet they feel real and lived in. Their chemistry is remarkable, they are all in on the romance, the wrestling and the family. 

Florence Pugh is solid as Paige, though she lacks her swagger and lithe physique. As written, Paige is not the character we know from the WWE. Pugh plays the behind the scenes Paige as a shrinking violet, a homesick and cowed young woman, completely opposite of the wild child, charismatic, divas champion we would come to know and cheer for. There is a stock quality to the story of Paige learning to find herself, find her voice and her confidence. I don’t doubt that the real Paige went on that journey, but this is unquestionably the sanitized, safe for work take on that journey. 

Wrestling fans will undoubtedly recognize how compressed the timeline of Paige’s career is. In real life, Paige wrestled in America before her WWE debut in a company called Shimmer. She also was an overachiever in WWE Developmental where she won over the company brass enough to be picked to win the very first NXT Women’s Championship, months before her post-Wrestlemania 30 Monday Night Raw debut which is the culmination of Fighting with My Family. 

The film fails to mention that Paige was the NXT Women’s Champion when she she debuted on Monday Night Raw and many of the fans in attendance that night were fully aware of who she was when she went to the ring that night against Diva’s Champion A.J Lee, portrayed in the movie by current WWE superstar, Zelina Vega. The makers of Fighting with My Family would have you believe that she was some unknown wrestler getting a shot out of the blue. Then again, the movie would have you believe that Vince McMahon doesn’t exist and pull every string in the company or that a wrestler would make it to Monday Night Raw without seeing Vince first. 

An interesting thing about Paige is that her life after the events of this movie is way more interesting than her rise to fame. From the place where Fighting with My Family ends to today, Paige has gone through career threatening injuries, a sex tape scandal, a reportedly abusive relationship with a fellow wrestler, drug suspensions and eventually, a career ending injury to her neck that led to her having to find a whole new place in the wrestling world. 

That, however, is not a movie that Paige or the WWE would want to make. That’s a complex journey that has fewer of the warm fuzzy moments that Fighting with My Family is built around. That’s a gritty movie with much more humanity and frailty than the mythic, sweet and funny journey of self discovery that is Fighting with My Family. You can’t slap a PG 13 on that movie and mass market it to an audience of young wrestling fans. 

That said, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with not making that movie and instead making Fighting with My Family. Indeed, Fighting with My Family is a perfectly acceptable, if somewhat bland comedy and biopic. The supporting cast is wonderfully colorful and the world of WWE, though it is completely whitewashed, has a fun, mythic quality to it that, as a wrestling fan, I find entertaining. It’s the WWE of Vince McMahon’s fantasy world. 

By the way, for those wondering about Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s role in Fighting with My Family, much of what you see in the movie really happened. It was The Rock who informed Paige that she was going to be debuting on Monday Night Raw, a scene of wonderful comedy in the movie. There are some fudges in the timeline of Paige’s life in WWE and Developmental WWE but that scene really happened in a form similar to how it plays in the movie.

Movie Review: Doom

Doom (2005) 

Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak 

Written by David Callaham, Wesley Strick 

Starring Karl Urban, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Rosamund Pike 

Release Date October 21st, 2005 

Published October 22nd, 2005 

I am a huge fan of The Rock. The guy is charismatic, he's cool, he's big and surprisingly funny. That talent was on display in both of his previous roles in the action movies The Rundown and Walking Tall. So what happened to Doom?  Director Andrzej Bartkowiak somehow manages to strip The Rock of his charisma, his humor and any of his other appealing qualities for this human vs. aliens video game retread. Doom had little going for it when it was conceived. Take away the only really appealing element it had in Dwayne Johnson and you have one of the worst films of the year.

On Mars a futuristic research facility has sent out a distress signal of unknown origin. Scientists and archaeologists have disappeared and no one in the facility seems to know why. Enter the Sarge (Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson) and his team of marine mercenaries. Sent to mars to find the missing scientists and help the corporation recover proprietary data, they soon find themselves up against an enemy that may or may not be human.

Hey wait... isn't that the plot for Resident Evil 2? Remove the trip to outer space and toss in Milla Jovovich in some skimpy ass-kicking outfit and you have essentially the same movie. There are even zombies in Doom and possibly, this point was not all that clear, a virus.

Funny thing, there were no zombies at all in the video game on which Doom is based. Of course there weren't any characters in the game either. Instead of The Sarge or Grimm (Karl Urban) or Destroyer (Deobia Oeparai) or the Kid (Al Weaver) you had the first person point of view of a gun that you used to blast alien monsters.

Creative license, I'm sure, was necessary for adapting Doom to the big screen but this departure is rather extreme and made worse by the fact that it's a near complete rip off of another bad video game adaptation. It's bad enough Hollywood studios cannot resist making video games into movies but do they have to make them knockoffs of other video game movies? UGH! 

We might have predicted the kind of disaster that is Doom considering the director. Polish born director Andrzej Bartkowiak, has the kind of resume that only Uwe Boll could envy. Bartkowiak directed two atrocious Jet Li flicks, Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 The Grave and, most egregiously, he brought Steven Seagal's Exit Wounds to the big screen, a cinematic nightmare of incalculable proportions.

Consider ourselves lucky Bartkowiak did not include Mr. Seagal in Doom. The combination of this already bad idea with Seagal might have caused time and space to collapse upon itself in a cosmic gag reflex hurling us all into the ether. Sorry, I'm just saying maybe things could have been worse.

In a nod to gamers Doom retains the first person shooting scenario that is one of the games trademarks. Unfortunately, once we enter the first person mode, which happens for much of the last 20 minutes of the film, watching Doom becomes very much like watching someone else play a videogame and knowing you don't ever get a turn.

The one thing the film had going for it was The Rock. Sadly, cast as taciturn, humorless pseudo cyborg killing machine The Rock loses every last bit of the personality that made him a star. The action genre that The Rock has quickly risen to dominate, in terms of the classic one man against the world Stallone-Schwarzenegger-Van Damme action genre and not the genre as a whole, is built on physicality and personality. Removed from that mold Rock is just another beefcake behemoth with a gun.

Walking Tall was an old school action flick that played to the strengths of Rock's personality while being just different enough from the old school to seem fresh and fun. The Rundown is an out and out buddy comedy that really allowed Rock to cut loose with that fresh charismatic smile and surly but exciting demeanor that I had hoped would become his trademark. Doom is a major step backward for the man once known in the world of professional wrestling as 'the most electrifying man in sports entertainment'.

Just who is the audience for Doom? Teenage boys who loved the videogame might find something to enjoy. But even the least discerning teenage male must have his limit. Doom is an abysmal mess of genre knockoffs and an outright theft of another movies plot and action. And the movie it steals from, Resident Evil 2, isn't very good either so you can imagine how bad a knockoff would be. 

Throw another hack director into the movie marketplace. Andrzej Bartkowiak joins Uwe Boll and the king of all hacks Paul W.S Anderson in the ranks of directors dragging the standards of Hollywood filmmaking to new lows. Where is the justice? Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and other auteurs struggle to find financing for their work, often having to leave the country as Allen did for his latest film Match Point, to find the funding to make one small picture.

Hacks on the other hand are finding ever growing budgets and clout. I know Hollywood is a business but that does not make such practices right. Watch Doom and tell me you disagree.