The Films – Great, Okay, Bad
The Rock Collection includes The Rundown, Doom, and The Scorpion King, each in their own individual cases. Actually, it’s worth noting that this isn’t a box set in that there isn’t a single box containing all three films – rather, this is just a collection of three films bound together in the same retail package.
That said, The Rundown is easily the best and most appealing film of this set. The Rundown features The Rock starring alongside Seann William Scott, Rosario Dawson, and the always enjoyable Christopher Walken. The Rock plays as Beck, a nice, but very tough guy who is paid to complete various ‘jobs.’ His ultimate goal is to become a gourmet chef and have his own restaurant, but he has just one more job to do for his (mob) boss, and that is to retrieve the mob boss’s son, played by Seann William Scott. Seann’s character, Travis, is a goofy adventurer trying to find a priceless treasure in the Amazon; he could come home, but refuses to. Travis receives help and is somewhat friends with a local bar owner, Mariana (Dawson). Christopher Walken’s character, named Hatcher, is the evil ruler/owner of this small Brazilian village – he keeps the citizens busy with mining under very harsh conditions.
The Rock decides to take the job to retrieve Travis. After being dropped off in the town, he attempts to do his job peacefully, explaining to Hatcher his reason for visiting his town. Hatcher eventually finds out that Travis has located the treasure and not only refuses to let Beck take him, but also demands that Travis show him the location of this treasure. Beck manages to capture Seann regardless, but the two have a rocky relationship throughout most of the film, with Beck focused on his job, and Travis trying to stay in Brazil and not get forced home. Several scenes of good comedy come out of this relationship, but they’re balanced very well with some superb action.
To sum it up, The Rundown is a great action comedy with some serious undertones. The characters are interesting and well developed and the pace of the film is excellent, as well as the balance of comedy and action.
The second release in this set, Doom, came out in 2005 and was based off the story from the popular Doom 3 video game. Overall, it’s not the worst video game to movie conversion film I have seen, but it certainly isn’t one of the best either. This Blu-ray release is also the Uncut, Extended Edition of the film giving it a runtime of nearly two hours, and frankly it runs a bit long in the tooth by the time the credits roll.
So in Doom, The Rock plays Sarge, a hardcore marine through and through who is focused solely on the mission objectives in a very cut and dry manner. Sarge and his team of marines get orders to secure a level five quarantine situation at the UAC Facility on Mars. His team consists of actors Deobia Oparei, Yao Chin, Karl Urban, Ben Daniels, Razaaq Adoti, and Richard Brake. When they first arrive on Mars and enter the UAC facility, they have no idea what they’re up against. As the plot unfolds, we discover that some bioengineering/genetic mutation experiments done in UAC went bad, and suddenly there are some ghastly creatures roaming around part of the UAC facility, killing everything in site.
The majority of the movie has Sarge and his crew walking around the poorly lit UAC facility, trying to locate six missing scientists. In a lot of ways, Doom plays out like the classic Schwarzenegger film Predator – you have a team of big-gun-toting soldiers who get knocked off one by one by a sneaky monster, or monsters in this case. There are a few plot twists that add some variety, but all in all, this is a very straight-forward sci-fi action movie with some horror and lots of gore; the acting is great, the characters are almost all the same, and in the end you have a film that’s worth a rental, but outright purchases should be left for true fans.
Film three in this collection is The Scorpion King. The story takes place many hundreds of years ago, in the sands of Egypt, before the time of Pharaohs. At this time, there was a man named Memnon, played by Steven Brand, who was hellbent on conquering the land. His intentions are 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 out 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.
Presentation Quality And Extras
The presentation quality of these three Blu-rays varies a little bit, with The Rundown and Doom looking very good to great, which you’d expect, but The Scorpion King fails to impress. 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 given how Universal Blu-rays are usually top notch. On the other hand, The Rundown and Doom look great, no complaints here. All three Blu-rays feature 5.1 Digital Surround sound and each release sounds great.
As far as extras, there are quite a few for The Rundown and Doom, and just one for The Scorpion King. Let’s break it down:
The Rundown
-My Scenes – Universal’s applet that allows you to make your own Bookmarks.
-Deleted Scenes – Six or seven scenes, all in SD, totaling about fourteen minutes.
-Rumble In the Jungle – A ten and a half minute SD look at the training the actors went through to get ready for the action in The Rundown. Includes interviews with cast and crew and behind the scenes/production footage.
-Amazon, Hawaiian Style – This is a five and a half minute look at the location, Hawaii, used to in filming. Cast and crew interviews along with more behind the scenes footage included.
-Appetite For Destruction – An eight and a half minute SD feature focusing on Seann and one of the final scenes in the film where a bus explodes near him. The effects crew talks shop as well; more production footage shown.
-The Rundown, Uncensored – A goofy six minute SD feature that is supposed to be comedic. It involves production footage of the baboon scene and some cast interviews.
-Running Down the Town – A brief four minute SD look at the village or town set used. The production designer takes us through the mock village.
-Walken’s World – A five and a half minute feature in SD with interviews and production footage, focusing on Christopher Walken. Cast and crew interviews about Walken included.
-Audio Commentaries – Two audio commentary tracks are included. The first has Director Peter Berg and The Rock, the second has Producers Kevin Misher and Marc Abraham.
Not a bad set of extras for The Rundown, although all of these are in SD and were previously seen on the DVD release.
For Doom, the extras are:
-My Scenes – Universal’s applet that allows you to make your own Bookmarks.
-Basic Training – A ten and a half minute feature in SD with cast and crew interviews and behind the scenes footage with the action/military trainer brought in to help the actors get accustomed to their roles.
-Rock Formation – This is a five and a half feature, in SD, with the effects crew talking shop about how they made The Rock transform as he did during the final scenes of the film.
-Master Monster Makers – A fairly interesting, eleven minute SD look at what went into making some of the monsters seen in the movie; interviews and behind the scenes footage included.
-FPS Sequence – A six minute SD look at the FPS sequence at the end of the movie; crew interviews discuss all the work that went into making this scene.
-Doom Nation – I enjoyed this fifteen minute SD feature about the popularity and history of Doom; the first ten minutes are about the original series, and include interview and commentary from some iD developers as well as some of the faces of G4TV. The last few minutes focus on Doom 3.
-Game On! – A seven minute, SD guide to the first parts of Doom 3.
-BDLive – Right now, you can view trailers of other Universal products and share My Scenes bookmarks.
And finally, for The Scorpion King, there is just one extra feature – audio commentary with director Chuck Russell.
And there you have it – The Rock Collection.