Dwayne Johnson’s love of making movies set in the jungle has been widely memed for years, but it’s easy to forget that his first trip into the luscious rainforest came back when he was still being billed as The Rock. In fact, Peter Berg’s The Rundown was even known as Welcome to the Jungle in certain international markets, but it flopped in all of them regardless of its moniker.
That’s definitely not what it deserved, though, with the $80 million action comedy having spent 20 years being supremely underrated, and arguably reigning the A-list superstar’s most purely enjoyable starring vehicle. It’s certainly a rarity, that’s for sure, seeing as it’s a 100 percent original property that largely focuses on the hulking hero’s refusal to use guns, at least until the third act climax.
Sparkling chemistry between Johnson and Seann William Scott, a supremely hammy Christopher Walken performance as the villain of the piece, and some inventive action sequences all combine to form a genuinely underrated exercise in pulse-pounding excellence, which is finally feeling the love after one solitary tweet echoed the sentiments of an entire generation.
There was talk of a potential sequel for a while, but given that Johnson moved onto much bigger, costlier, and altogether less interesting things in the decades to follow, it’s never gonna happen. A crying shame without a doubt, though, because The Rundown had all the potential in the world to launch a money-spinning multi-film series, albeit with the notable caveat that the first installment went down in a ball of box office flames.
