Could Have Benefited From A Few People’s Elbows
During The Rock’s professional wrestling career, he was always one of the most exciting and charismatic performers on the roster. While not a big wrestling fan, I have seen dozens of his matches via “best of” DVDs and other compilations, and the one thing they had in common is excitement. Giving The Rock a bow and arrow and a big sword with the basic order to assassinate a sorcerer and a war general, you’d think things would be, well, rockin.
Before I get into why this isn’t the case, let me explain some of the story. Many hundreds of years ago, in the sands of Egypt, before the time of Pharaohs, there was a man named Memnon, played by Steven Brand, who was hellbent on conquering the land. His intentions, it is revealed at a point in the movie, was to quell the dissent and unrest in the land by enforcing obedience, even in the absence of loyalty. The Rock plays Mathayus, a badass warrior from a tribe of people known as the Akkadians. He sets to kill the sorcerer, played by Kelly Hu, that aids Memnon by providing futuristic visions that help the warlord win his battles, but he falls in love with her instead. Anyway, he’s also got a score to settle with Memnon, who killed his brother. With the help of Philos, and Arpid, as well as several other small roles, Mathayus not surprisingly fights his way through Memnon’s forces until a final climatic battle.
One point about The Scorpion King that struck me early and several times over the course of the film was the attempts at comedy. On one hand, this film tries to portray a grim and powerful story of a warrior, with lots of bladed violence and so forth. On the other hand, we get these brief verbal and sometimes physical acts of comedy that don’t just don’t sit well with the first intention of this film. The result was that I didn’t really care much for the story or the characters after only about twenty minutes had passed because the film seemed to not take itself seriously, even when at first it seemed like it was going to try to.
As far as acting and plot development, I wasn’t impressed with either. The Scorpion King came across as a clichéd and generic action movie, complete with the overdramatic soundtrack and weak villain. Surprises and interesting twists in The Scorpion King weren’t present, and it felt very predictable throughout.
On Blu-ray
I was surprised by the visual quality of The Scorpion King on Blu-ray, but unfortunately not in a good way. The amount of scenes that featured very splotchy visuals was quite high. Any scene that is indoors and is lit by fire, as in torches, really shows what I mean. The dark areas, like the shadows and unlit areas, show a great deal of unpolished textures. The actors’ faces and exposed skin also suffer from this, and it’s distracting and rather surprising – Universal has released some excellent Blu-rays and HD-DVDs before that, so I was a bit shocked by this presentation. Now that said, there are also lots of scenes whereby the visual quality is very good, great even, as you would expect. These are primarily found in the outside daylight shots, as we see when The Rock is crossing the desert and when he infiltrates Memnon’s fortress walls. In these instances, the visuals are crisp and bright and nice.
I though the DTS audio provided a more consistently pleasing experience. I didn’t find any significant issues with the technical audio presentation.
Additional Features; er, Feature That Is
You can just about tell how hard a studio worked on a Blu-ray or DVD release by the number of extras or features that are included. This isn’t a universal rule of course, but most of us know by now that if we see a release with just one or two, or zero, extras, that’s a concern. With The Scorpion King, we get a single audio commentary track with director Chuck Russell; yay.
