Walking Tall (2004)

There is absolutely nothing special about this movie. It is average all the way. It is however a decent enough off-the-shelf action flick which fulfils its purpose. That is to provide an hour and a half of decent entertainment. Our hero comes back from being away for quite a while and finds the bad guys are in control. A pretty classical story which have been used since the first movies were made (and even before that). The movie can easily be said to be a modern day Western movie as far as the story goes. Our hero, Dwayne Johnson, is doing a decent job of being a hero. The actions scenes, which is really why you are watching this movie after all, are reasonably well done. Of course they are more of TV-movie quality than anything else but good enough in the context of this movie. The movie plays out more or less exactly as you would expect. Hero comes home, find bad guys in control, gets into shuffle with bad guys, bad guys tries to take on hero via family and friends, fails, hero goes after main bad guy in a long chase/fight, happy ending, roll after texts. As I wrote, it could just as well have been an old Western movie. The traditional western saloon is replaced by a casino and the whisky and cattle is replaced with crooked gambling and some modern drug dealing. The one part I though was silly, as in bad silly, was the trial in the first half of the movie. Warning, spoiler ahead! I mean, come on. Hero demolishes Casino and gets put on trial, hero shows jury his scars and asks to get a non-guilty verdict, jury happily obliges him. What the f…? Apart from this the movie completed its mission of knocking and hour and a half off my life while keeping me from being bored in front of the TV.