Central Intelligence [Review by Haus]

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has been very much in my mind of late. First came the Rock Clock, the hilarious (if hilariously buggy) alarm clock that urges you to wake up at 4:15am and CRUSH your goals. I also discovered HBO’s Ballers, which (on the strength of Johnson’s gentle-giant presence and megawatt grin) makes for some strong television indeed. Add to this the fact that a longtime friend, collaborator, and general He-Dog extols The Rock’s motivational virtue at least once per day, and in sum, I’ve been having a bit of a Rockaissance.

Into this gusty tailwind of positivity director Rawson Marshall Thurber launches Central Intelligence: a spy-gloss buddy comedy that’s just too weird for its own good.

To start with, it’s mis-titled. The CIA story doesn’t even show up until act two, after a meandering introduction that dwells on Johnson and Kevin Hart‘s high school past. In typical film trope form, it’s twenty years after graduation, and the humiliated “fat kid” (a nice CGI face-swap of Johnson) and the popular athlete voted most likely to succeed (Hart) seem to have swapped places. Hart is a workaday accountant watching others get promoted, and Johnson is — well, let’s see. He barges into Hart’s story as a strange, unicorn-obsessed, emoticon-addicted, socially awkward but good-natured loner who spends a quarter of his life in the gym. Are we sympathetic? Impressed? Is he funny? Are we in on the joke? Is he good? Bad? Lying? It’s all very hard to figure out. And it gets no easier with time.

I endured the uncomfortable experience of spending the vast majority of this film’s ample running time really wondering what the joke was here. Johnson cycles back and forth between his usual, grinning, take-no-prisoners, gleaming-delts tough guy persona, and this weird, stunted overeager hanger-on. The ultimate message, I think, is supposed to be that he’s actually both, but for this reviewer it didn’t play clearly at all.

Johnson’s in the CIA (or maybe not), and he ropes Hart in to helping him stop some indeterminate Bad Thing from happening, all while being pursued by the (real? or again not?) CIA. Hart and Johnson have terrific comedic chemistry, both are legitimately funny guys, and there are a few lol-worthy lines. That’s good, because this comedic glaze picks up the slack left by the shockingly stupid plot, which doesn’t even make sense on its own terms, and is periodically violent enough to be strangely unpleasant. (The titular agency might as well have been “Sector Seven” from Transformers, given its reliance on squealing around in murdered-out suburbans with LED grilles and having the same three suit-clad agents showing up five minutes late to every scene.) It’s probably wrong of me to take pot shots at plot knots when the Rock talks, but what can you do. This story be dumb, folks.

The balm on this rude wound of screenwriting is that Central Intelligence is essentially two movies. The CIA-driven story is a dead-stick failure, but the other — a story about goals, fading potential, bullies, high school reunions, and so on — is actually not bad. It’s a shame the filmmakers chose just to book-end the former with the latter. I would have much preferred this film as a pure Grosse Pointe Blank-style reunion navel-gaze, admittedly one with a room temperature IQ. As it is, it’s disjointed, largely senseless, and unfulfilling from a story perspective.

But still, you know, uniquely satisfying from a Rock perspective. Just love watching that guy.

Haus Verdict: Forgettable CIA baloney that you might actually enjoy, just on the strength of Johnson and Hart’s chemistry, and the high school arc. 

Central Intelligence opens Friday, June 17.

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