Coming not-so-fresh off The Scorpion King, wrestler-turned-actor The Rock (not yet billed as Dwayne Johnson) fully earned his action-hero credentials in the enjoyable comedic adventure romp The Rundown.
He plays a “retrieval expert,” which mostly means he collects gambling debts, by force if he has to, although he hates guns. Eager to get out of the biz, he’s cajoled into the requisite One Last Job: plucking the boss’ snot-nosed son (American Pie’s Seann William Scott) out of Brazil and bringing him back home to L.A. Scott, however, doesn’t want to go, seeing as how he’s stumbled on to a treasure he’s hidden in the jungle – a treasure also wanted by a group of rebels led by barmaid Rosario Dawson, as well as the poor city’s devious slave ring owner Christopher Walken, (who is, no shock, 100 percent pure Walken).
So The Rock and Scott get to bicker and spar like The Defiant Ones, forging a bond only out of necessity to stay alive. They find themselves in the middle of a machine-gun riot, at the mercy of hallucinogenic fruit and having their faces humped by crazed monkeys. Their greatest adversary proves to be Ernie Reyes Jr. (the Surf Ninjas star all grown up), who unleashes his “spinning Tarzan jujitsu” on The Rock, in not only the film’s best fight scene, but best scene, period.
I’m not so much surprised by how pleasurable The Rundown is to watch than I am how charismatic The Rock is on screen. He’s a natural, a logical heir to the throne of Arnold Schwarzenegger (who cameos early in the film to pass the torch, so to speak) and can dispense lines like “You’re threatening me? You’re threatening me with pee?” with note-perfect delivery. —Rod Lott
At a time before the word “horror” even had a translated equivalent in Japan, writer/director Nobuo Nakagawa gave the country something to be all shook up about: a cinematic trip to Hell, and one full of gore of that! 
Finally, with a little more than half an hour to spare in the running time, he goes to Hell. Worse, Buddhists believe in a Hell comprised of eight Hells, so buckle up! Upon arrival, he gets his throat pierced, has to view a Your Life’s Greatest Fuck-Ups reel and learns just how hot flames of eternity can be. Shirô gets the 25-cent tour and sees the newly dead being flayed, boiled and spiked for punishment — different strokes for different folks, all rather graphically depicted with lots of red acrylic paint. 
One emergency landing later, the remaining passengers and crew disembark into a terminal that’s sealed off from the airport. They’re flat-out stuck, which wouldn’t necessarily be bad if the infected weren’t hiding in the shadows, either. The behind-the-scenes luggage area gives newbie director (and 
I find pot humor to be the anthesis of funny when it pops up in comedies, so imagine 83 minutes of it. And I do mean imagine, because you shouldn’t waste your time on Charles Band’s 
When each guy smokes it — only Alistair doesn’t partake — he’s transported to the Club Bong strip club, where the fake-breasted dancers sport carnivorous chests that kill the dudes in real life. (All the movie is set either here — with animated ganja smoke around the edges of the frame — or at their home, which looks like the set of a sitcom threatening to burst into a porno.) Tommy Chong saves the day and runs toy cars up and down said man-made mammaries.