The Bottom Line, Oct. 14: The Rock Puts on Game as ‘Doom’sday Arrives

Can you still smell what The Rock is cooking?

Only one dish now comes to mind: a heaping helping of underachievement.

Four years ago, The Rock elbowed his way out of the wrestling ring with a highly hyped appearance in The Mummy Returns. The handsomely chiseled face of the WWE sought to transform himself into the next action hero at a time when wrestling’s popularity was waning. And all bowed down to The Scorpion King, a Mummy spin-off. The Rock‘s charm and charisma clearly set him apart from the other wrestlers who had tried–with little success–to go Hollywood.

So the Samoan Samson got tagged as–what else?–another possible successor to the Austrian Oak. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger seemingly acknowledged this with his cameo in The Rundown. But after The Scorpion King, the former Dwayne Johnson has been anything but rock steady at the box office. The Rundown, Walking Tall and Be Cool all qualify as disappointments. That leaves The Rock hurtling toward certain doom. Or at least Doom, a film version of the controversial 1993 video game that finds The Rock and his fellow marines gunning down monsters on the loose in a research lab on Mars.

Doom represents somewhat of a risk for The Rock. For every Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil and Tomb Raider, there are such disasters as Alone in the Dark, Double Dragon, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, House of the Dead and Wing Commander.

Video game adaptations fail because they never transcend their source material. They’re nothing more than a flimsy excuse to cause death and destruction, and filmmakers rarely add flesh to the bones of their game-originated protagonists (except to Lara Croft’s bust). Doom is no exception, with a grim-faced Rock–stripped bare of his colorful personality–shooting up everything in sight. Also, with its confined setting and reanimated corpses, Doom too closely recalls the much-maligned Resident Evil.

The R-rated Doom won’t touch Tomb Raider‘s $131.1 million. But as The Rock leads the charge, and with joystick jockeys sure to appreciate the film embracing the game’s signature first-person shootouts, Doom should at least blast past Mortal Kombat‘s $70.4 million. That would be enough to give The Rock his biggest post-Scorpion King hit.

It’s not that The Rock‘s hasn’t tried hard since The Scorpion King.

The Rundown was a fun rumble in the jungle. Maybe few wanted to see him paired him with Seann William Scott, who wasn’t any assistance to Chow Yun-Fat in Bulletproof Monk. Or perhaps Universal mistakenly released The Rundown in early fall 2003 rather than in the summer, when it would have had blockbuster potential.

OK, the Walking Tall remake was lousy. What worked in the 1970s–backwoods justice in the form of a wood club–is too quaint in this day and age. So The Rock swung away to no avail.

Be Cool made absolutely sense. It represented a terrific opportunity for The Rock to lampoon his macho ways without being the true star of the film. The Rock‘s strategy worked: he was a hoot as the gay bouncer who was more country than rock ‘n’ roll. He stole Be Cool from John Travolta and proved he should one day headline his own comedy.

Unfortunately, the Get Shorty sequel was too little, too late. And it buckled under the weight of an ensemble cast that included Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Harvey Keitel and Cedric the Entertainer.

Thankfully, that experience has not put off The Rock from demonstrating there’s more to him than an arched eyebrow and a snappy catchphrase. Next year, he helps to weave Southland Tales as an action star suffering from amnesia. This isn’t The Bourne Identity–it’s Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly‘s musical comedy about L.A. life in 2008. Doubt it will be music to the ears of those who order WrestleMania PPVs, but it should be one of 2006’s more intriguing offerings.

The Rock‘s also hoping to score with Gridiron Gang (Sept. 15), an uplifting true sports story á la Remember the Titans. His days as a University of Miami defensive linesman should make him feel at ease in his first dramatic role: his probation officer teaches football at a juvenile detention center. And, of course, he’s talked up for years King Kamehameha, an epic about the tribal leader who united the island of Hawaii.

Wrestling fans, don’t worry, The Rock‘s not going soft on you. He’s got a possible True Lies in a big-screen version of the arcade game Spy-Hunter (what next? The Rock as Pac-Man?). He’s also scheduled a Ride Along as a cop trying to intimidate future brother-in-law Ryan Reynolds. And if anyone has the brawn and comic bravura to play Johnny Bravo, it’s The Rock.