The 2005 “stinker” Dwayne Johnson doesn’t want you to see: “Nobody else did”
Having finally shown the world that he could actually act when he wanted to, Dwayne Johnson immediately reverted to type, which says everything about the battle between ego and ambition.
Nine times out of ten, if an actor had given a performance described as the single finest of a calendar year by no less of an authority than Christopher Nolan, you’d expect it to blow the strongest wind yet into their sales, inspiring and empowering them to seek out even more complex, challenging parts.
However, this is ‘The Rock’ we’re talking about, and after doing the unthinkable and not playing a thinly veiled extension of himself for the first time in forever to acclaimed, Golden Globe-nominated effect in The Smashing Machine, his next two releases are the live-action Moana remake and a Jumanji sequel.
Of course, he’s got another collaboration with Benny Safdie simmering away in the background and a tantalising partnership with Martin Scorsese on the back burner, but it feels like a case of one step forward and two steps back for the former professional wrestler, who earned a lot of goodwill and opened a lot of doors with The Smashing Machine, only to walk back into the one he’d just left behind.
Nobody knows for sure if it was the beginning of a new chapter or an anomaly, but what isn’t up for debate is that there’s one of his movies that Johnson never hopes to replicate. It isn’t The Tooth Fairy, either, although it’s still reasonable to assume that he won’t be squeezing himself into a tutu again.
In 2005, he boarded the video game adaptation train for the first time and headlined Doom, a film so bad that it continues to haunt co-star Rosamund Pike to this day. As for ‘The Rock’? He was fully aware that it didn’t avoid the console-to-screen pitfalls. “I starred in the stinker, Doom,” he noted. “So I have lived thy curse.”
Commercial failure, critical disaster, and a Razzie nomination for ‘Worst Actor’ were all that he had to show for it at the end of the day, so it’s no surprise that even when the opportunity wasn’t presenting itself, since he was inducting his father into the WWE Hall of Fame at the time, Johnson seized the chance to fire a shot across the bows and urge everyone to avoid it like the plague.
“By the way, I made Doom,” he accurately pointed out. “Did you ever see Doom? Well, you probably didn’t, and it’s OK, because nobody else did, either.” Ironically, he had another picture that was released in 2005, and the Get Shorty Sequel, Be Cool, showed that he was more than a one-note muscle guy after he stole every scene he was in as a gay bodyguard.
In this instance, though, the bad was more memorable than the good, with the stench of Doom continuing to linger for 20 years, to the point that Johnson and Pike still haven’t gotten over it.
