Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Lisa Laman | Film | September 30, 2025
Can you SMELLLLL … what The Rock is cooking? That would be a career pivot away from the big action blockbusters he cranked out once or twice a year in the 2010s. With the box office numbers for Jungle Cruise, Red One, and Black Adam (the latter of which was supposed to launch a whole interconnected series of DC films) drying up, Johnson is migrating over to smaller-scale dramas.
Shifting up the type of films he’s headlining isn’t unprecedented for Dwayne Johnson. My first introduction to the guy (as a young woman who didn’t watch WWE) was on a June 2008 Entertainment Weekly cover where his knowing grin was accompanied by the text “THE NEXT A-LIST.” Inside, Johnson, on the set of Race to Witch Mountain, noted that he was shifting into comedies and family films after action titles like Doom struck out. What’s old is new again. That includes Johnson altering his artistic pursuits.
Time being a flat circle and all that jazz means that The Smashing Machine, Johnson’s fall 2025 foray into arthouse cinema, isn’t his first run-in with auteur-driven, smaller-scale cinema. Twenty years ago, he anchored a little film called Southland Tales, which demonstrated the acting chops and versatility he never displayed in Hobbs & Shaw or Skyscraper.
What Is Southland Tales?
After Donnie Darko, director Richard Kelly was swinging for the fences. This filmmaker established a name for himself, and now he was going to build on it. Enter: Southland Tales, a labyrinthine Bush-era satire presenting a vision of 2008 America where conspiracies are everywhere, El Paso, Texas is a crater, and the military-industrial complex has its tendrils in everything. Johnson is the anchor of this feature, playing action star Boxer Santaros (hey, meta-casting!) A barrage of bizarrely assembled actors round out the ensemble cast, including Justin Timberlake, Kevin Smith, Christopher Lambert, and Amy Poehler.
Though a thriller, Southland Tales has way more dark comedy impulses than Donnie Darko. The ominous suburban tableau of that feature is traded out here for meek men remarking, “I’m just gonna roller skate home now,” and commercials where cars hump each other. It’s a ludicrous enterprise and an irresistibly insane one too. A byzantine film critics deemed incoherent and impenetrable at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival is perfectly relevant for an age of brainrot internet “content” and ludicrousness now just being one more headline on your social media feed.
Is any line in Southland Tales really more bizarre than the real-life FBI director saying “see you in Valhalla” about Charlie Kirk? Like Showgirls, this Kelly directorial effort has grown from being a pop-culture punchline to a prescient piece of cinematic satire.
Believe it or not, Johnson’s presence plays a key role in Southland Tales working. For one thing, he epitomizes the film’s unusual casting approach (Seann William Scott and Saturday Night Live veterans are the default actors here). Filtering a tale of American Armageddon through faces you wouldn’t expect to headline a dystopian thriller reflects how domestic anguish can affect anyone. It isn’t just actors you associate with ’70s political thrillers or the hot young people dominating the A-list. Cheri Oteri and The Scorpion King are also impacted by America’s problems.
Johnson Doesn’t Condescend to the Weirdness of Southland Tales
Johnson also displays a level of commitment to Southland Tales that’s totally absent from his later work. There’s too much postmodern snark in his Jungle Cruise or Baywatch performances, which creates a barrier between the audience and his characters. Johnson’s always snarking about how preposterous everything around him is, which deflates all the in-universe tension. In contrast, as Santaros, Johnson doesn’t waver in executing lines like “pimps don’t commit suicide” and “maybe in the end, that’s all we have. The Memory Gospel” without a glimmer of irony.
He’s also great at executing physical comedy in the film, such as a wide shot where (following the orders of Jon Lovitz’s Bart Bookman) he scampers on home in the image’s background. You can practically hear the Curly-style “whoop whoop whoop” as he gallops away. As the film spirals out of control, Johnson’s intensity never wavers. He’s willing to effectively channel every inch of the increasing madness.
In the greater context of his career, these virtues in Johnson’s Southland Tales performance are also delightful because they’re not something audiences demanded he do. Johnson’s last 15 years of cinema have been about giving the people what they want and listening to what hashtags are popular on social media. Southland Tales, though, was nobody’s idea of a marketable concept. It exists on its own enthralling terms. This was Johnson pursuing art for the sake of art. If only he’d returned to that inclination more often between 2006 and 2025.
Southland Tales housing a deep ensemble cast also meant that this movie was a grand departure from later Johnson films that were solely oriented around his star image. Johnson’s Tales screentime isn’t dependent on making sure he doesn’t lose a fight or has the most screentime. He can vanish for lengthy periods of time so other actors like Timberlake or Scott can take center stage. Compare that to allegations of Johnson refusing to have his Black Adam character cross over with the Shazam! movies. Johnson’s just part of a larger puzzle in Southland Tales rather than dominating the entire endeavor.
Sadly, save for his entertaining, darkly comic turn in Pain & Gain, Johnson’s post-Southland Tales works didn’t utilize his gifts for lending gravitas and commitment to the inexplicable. The film became such a financial and critical boondoggle that it helped inspire Johnson to switch over to family movies. Working with filmmaker Benny Safdie on The Smashing Machine does highlight that Johnson’s getting back into the swing of indie cinema, ditto other projects he’s signed on for (including a Safdie reunion). However, that UFC fight biopic isn’t the first time Johnson eschewed conventional career wisdom for a juicier, more challenging role. 19 years ago, Johnson showed off his chops and reminded us all of one universal truth: “pimps don’t commit suicide.”
