Dwayne Johnson Proved He Was an Awards-Caliber Actor Long Before ‘The Smashing Machine’ in This Cult Classic

Ever since the successful premiere of Benny Safdie‘s TheSmashing Machine at the Venice Film Festival recently, there’s been a lot of praise for Dwayne Johnson‘s impressive leading performance in it, as well as predictions for major awards nominations for him. However, none of it comes off as a surprise to attentive viewers, who have been following Johnson’s acting career and therefore are aware of his versatile range. While usually being lauded as a perfect action hero who also possesses impressive comedic chops, Johnson also demonstrated his ability to be self-aware and blend in perfectly into the most unexpected and bizarre cinematic worlds. One of the early but memorable examples of this in the actor’s career is Richard Kelly‘s Southland Tales — a wonderfully off-the-rails 2006 extravaganza, which can remotely be described as a dystopian satire thriller with musical numbers.

In This Wild Film, Dwayne Johnson Gets to Play a Very Different Kind of Hero

Johnson plays one of the various protagonists of a complex plot — an amnesiac actor, Boxer Santaros, caught between several parties aiming to use him to further their own agenda. This two-and-a-half hour-long wild ride also features Sarah Michelle Gellar as a politically engaged former porn star who wishes for re-branding, two versions of Seann William Scott, evil state corporations straight out of George Orwell‘s dystopian prose, the fourth dimension, radical Neo-Marxists, global disasters that now seem more realistic than twenty years ago, and Justin Timberlake, who narrates the text about the Apocalypse. In 2006, such a film was the last thing anyone expected from the director of the much-acclaimed Donnie Darko, which led to Southland Tales having a pretty disastrous premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and becoming a huge critical and box-office failure.

But it’s not even the weirdness of the plot, which, depending on the perspective or the mood, one might find intricate or just nonsensical, that makes Southland Tales stand out and cause such strong reactions. It’s the movie’s unique intonation that turns relevant satire about the social and political anxieties of the time into a comic book epic, a hypertext with a myriad of references to pop culture, philosophy, and religion. These days, of course, Kelly’s work, which managed to gain a cult following over the years, surrounded by talks of potentially expanding the lore of the film into a franchise, feels not only curious and exciting but also nostalgic in the context of contemporary big-budget movie-making. Even though the film’s ideas are entirely relevant today and its multiplot narrative doesn’t come off as surprising, there is no way something like this could have been produced by a major studio these days.

Self-Irony Becomes the Secret Weapon Johnson Isn’t Afraid to Use — And Neither Is ‘Southland Tales’

As is usually the case with complex films, Southland Tales actually requires a lot from its actors. Satires only work when they are played more or less with straight faces, and the cast of Kelly’s film, led by Johnson, is a perfect example of that. In Johnson’s case, it is interesting that this role comes at what basically amounts to the early stage of his acting career. Typically, participation in a risky, auteur project like this, which offers a departure from the established screen persona, usually comes much later in most actors’ filmographies. By 2006, most of Johnson’s roles, like his brief appearance as the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns or the more full-fledged version of the character in the 2002 eponymous film, were mostly based on his physicality and charisma.

Films like The Rundown (where he played alongside Seann William Scott for the first time) and Be Cool gave Johnson an opportunity to also showcase his comedic abilities to a certain extent, but didn’t really offer much in that sense beyond some typical gags. Southland Tales became the first movie that took into account the actor’s powerful, bigger-than-life presence, but also allowed him vulnerability — something that he would expand on in his later performances, like the ones in Pain & Gain and The Smashing Machine. While Southland Tales isn’t a typical story by any account, there is one element in it that can be considered conventional. A character with amnesia, Johnson’s Boxer Santaros, becomes our point of entry into the narrative, as he himself strives to make sense of everything that’s going on around him. Being lost between the increasingly crazy reality and his own familiar image of a beloved hero gives Santaros a glimpse of relatability, which helps to ground us in this spectacularly bizarre world.

And since Southland Tales is an ensemble film at its core, Johnson also gets a chance to demonstrate his ability to step away from being a traditional leading man and work in tandem. His scenes with Scott are particularly interesting, since their dynamic is so vastly different from the one in The Rundown, and his brief episodes with both Gellar and his wife, played by Mandy Moore, demonstrate that it doesn’t take much for the actor to make any connection, no matter how outwardly bizarre, believable. The best asset of Johnson’s performance here, though, is that it isn’t only rooted in charisma but in self-awareness and self-irony. Some aspects of the film might get forgotten after a while, but Johnson’s donning a suit with a gun (his uniform in Get Smart, which will come out two years later), pitching a ridiculous script with wonderfully idiotic pathos, and stoically negotiating with a woman desperately demanding to give him a blowjob — that’s the stuff of legends.