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So ubiquitous over the course of the last 20 years that they had to name him thrice, no one does stupid quite like Dwayne Johnson , the man formerly known as The Rock and then, briefly, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. And his shifting aliases have nodded to the three different incarnations he’s embraced over the years.
When he was just The Rock, eyebrow-raising breakout star of the 1990s WWF, he was deathly serious, an intense caricature of machismo who struck fear in any number of brawny men. By the time he was Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, he had transformed into the comic relief, the scene-stealing co-star of films like Get Smart and Be Cool .
But once he had dropped his old moniker entirely, for the more straight-forward “Dwayne Johnson”, he had lost his mind, transforming into the undefeated king of the outrageous movie. Today Johnson is less a serious actor than a man synonymous with giant apes, gravity-defying leaps and Idris Elba with robot implants in his back.
To celebrate the release of Jumani: The Next Level
Show all 32 1 /32Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 321. Gridiron Gang (2006) Loosely based on the true story of the Kilpatrick Mustangs – a team comprising teenagers at a juvenile detention camp – Gridiron Gang would be more at home near the top of a list ranking Dwayne Johnson's most clichéd films than ridiculous.
Columbia Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 31. Snitch (2013) Snitch is an extremely straightforward action thriller with a lead character that ranks as Johnson's most believable: a father who goes undercover for the DEA to free his son who's imprisoned after being framed for drug dealing. The film was actually inspired by a documentary on new federal drug policies designed to encourage felons to snitch on their accomplices.
Summit Entertainment
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 30. Walking Tall (2004) A former US soldier who takes matters into his own hands after returning home to find his town overrun by crime is perhaps the role Johnson was born to play. Because of this, it ranks fairly high on the believability scale – seeing The Rock smash cars to pieces with a baseball bat is pretty tame compared to his actions in recent films.
MGM Distribution Co
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 29. The Other Guys (2010) Johnson makes a hilariously brief cameo in Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg buddy comedy The Other Guys, which kicks into gear when the pair are forced to replace the NYPD’s superstar detective duo of Johnson and Samuel L Jackson. Veritable action heroes on the New York streets, they are cocky, revered and incredibly expensive, costing the city millions of dollars in property damage every time they hit the beat. But because The Other Guys generally takes place in reality, Johnson and Jackson’s characters end up smack-down dead on concrete, riding high on their own confidence, after a foot chase spins out of control. It’s comic genius, and a Dwayne Johnson movie has never been more real.
Columbia Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 28. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2018) Incredibly successful Jumanji reboot Welcome to the Jungle has its fair share of nuttiness, Johnson and his cohorts Jack Black, Karen Gillan and Kevin Hart fending off rhinos, hungry hippos and angry militia men. But it’s also set entirely in a video game, Johnson embodying a fictional action hero avatar known as Dr Smolder Bravestone, and therefore resistant to such typically important factors as “rules” or “logic”. It’s basically believability Kryptonite.
Sony Pictures Releasing
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 27. Be Cool (2005) Otherwise appalling whenever he’s not on screen, Be Cool casts Johnson as a character whose absurdity has become increasingly less absurd as time has gone on. Back in 2005, casting Johnson as an aspiring actor desperate to make the big time, only to be ultimately rewarded with a starring role in a romantic drama titled Samoan Rendezvous alongside Nicole Kidman, felt ludicrous – but in light of how he has ascended the Hollywood ladder since, not so much. He also recreates a monologue from Bring It On, for what it’s worth.
MGM Distribution Co
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 26. Jumanji: The Next Level The zaniness ensues in Jumanji sequel, cleverly titled The Next Level, with Johnson and his gang – including Jack Black, Karen Gillan and Kevin Hart – caught up in antics involving mandrills, mercenaries and magic necklaces. Only slightly more ridiculous than the first installment for seeing Johnson impersonate a character played by Danny DeVito after he's sucked into the video game the film's largely set in.
AP
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 25. Central Intelligence (2016) Central Intelligence is big and broad as a comedy, its tagline (“Saving the world takes a little Hart and a big Johnson”) every bit the indicator of the film’s tone. But this vehicle for recurring co-stars Johnson and Kevin Hart is surprisingly authentic to their off-screen personas. Johnson plays a formerly obese school nerd who has grown into a wise and sensitive CIA agent – basically a fun-house mirror version of his transformation from high school turtleneck-wearer to A-list movie star.
Universal Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 24. Faster (2010) A grimy and underrated action vehicle for Johnson, Faster marked his last stand as a vaguely (and trust us with this) chameleon-like actor, before he became “Dwayne Johnson” and developed a particular strain of tics and trademarks. He’s a getaway driver known as Driver, hunted by a killer known as Killer, and in pursuit of a corrupt cop called Cop. The lack of names nods to classic Westerns, but if anything, this is true pulp fiction cinema, with a mood that’s more noir and heightened than plain stupid.
CBS Films
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 23. Get Smart (2008) Get Smart's existence as a film version of the classic spy series is what allows viewers to swallow the antics of its characters led by Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway. The extent of its ridiculousness is Carell's analyst being thrust into the field operative position after a terrorist organisation exposes the identity of all agents at the intelligence unit he works at. Beyond that, anything goes.
Warner Bros Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 22. The Game Plan (2007) Dwayne Johnson is, by all accounts, an incredibly nice guy. Even his minor political scandals are rectified within minutes with entirely acceptable apologies. But it makes parts like the one he plays in The Game Plan, that of a self-involved American football player uninterested in bonding with his long-lost daughter, particularly hard to believe. He bonds with her in the end, however – Madison Pettis’s gap-toothed, lispy charm breaking through Johnson’s harsh exterior per Disney family film tradition.
Buena Vista Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 21. GI Joe: Retaliation (2013) Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick were behind GI Joe: Retaliation, the oh-so-loud sequel to the film based on Hasbro's toy franchise. Johnson joined the cast as Roadblock, an artillery specialist who – you guessed it – saved the day and is set to return in a new crossover film with the Transformers.
Paramount Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 20. Welcome to the Jungle (2003) This old-school action-adventure – called The Rundown in the US – nods to the Dwayne Johnson of the future (hell, the title even predated his 2017 Jumanji reboot). It's a suitably zany jungle treasure hunt in the vein of Romancing the Stone. Christopher Walken is the bad guy, Rosario Dawson is the beautiful woman along for the ride and Seann William Scott, aka the Chris Pratt that should have been, is the comic relief, with Johnson troubled by explosions, car wrecks and very angry monkeys.
Columbia Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 19. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012) The most ridiculous aspect of Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, a follow-up to the Brendan Fraser-starring Journey to the Centre of the Earth? Michael Caine as an eccentric grandfather who lives in a hut made from the wreckage of a ship. Everything else is pretty standard for a family adventure.
Warner Bros Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 18. Race to Witch Mountain (2009) Johnson is a Los Angeles taxi driver who inadvertently picks up two alien children that need to retrieve their spaceship and return home. Race to Witch Mountain is also a Disney movie, released smack-dab in Johnson’s early “cutesy family film” phase and desperately unremarkable as a result.
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 17. Doom (2005) A film so silly that even Johnson has expressed his regrets about it, this (ahem) doomed adaptation of the popular video game saw him in boring Sylvester Stallone mode. He’s the muscle in a team of scientists battling a zombie virus located in a portal to Mars discovered in the desert outside Vegas. It also (spoiler alert) builds to a highly unbelievable ending in which Johnson is overpowered and turned into a zombie but then thrown into the Mars portal by tiny hero Karl Urban. Puh-lease.
Universal Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 16. Southland Tales (2006) Far and away the most bonkers film in Johnson’s filmography but also his most interesting by proxy, Southland Tales only makes sense if you really, really want it to. He’s an amnesiac action movie star entangled in a Republican Party conspiracy that involves neo-Marxist revolutionaries and something called the “the fourth dimension”. It’s also an oddly prophetic movie in how it depicts pornography, reality television and politics as overlapping and dependent on one another, and in the political aspirations of Johnson’s character. When Johnson hinted in 2017 that he may one day run for office, it made Southland Tales seem that bit less absurd.
Universal Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 15. Baywatch (2017) Why exactly are lifeguards investigating murders? It's a question you'll be asking throughout the big screen version of Baywatch, which is more smutty than the TV show ever was. One scene sees Alexandra Daddario's lifeguard tell a male colleague, played by Zac Efron, to look at her face instead of staring at her boobs. “I’m trying," he replies, "but it’s so close to your boobs." Yikes.
Paramount Picture
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 14. The Scorpion King (2002) Beloved by anyone who was between the ages of 10 and 12 when it came out, The Scorpion King was Johnson’s first starring role, and inexplicably decent considering the CGI eye-sore teaser it received in the earlier Mummy Returns. The Scorpion King is, naturally, swords-and-sandals cheese, with an array of sub-Indiana Jones set pieces including a memorable one involving Johnson being buried up to his neck in the ground and forced to squash a number of approaching fire ants with his chin. There’s also a wacky camel sidekick, which only increases the enjoyable madness of it all.
Universal Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 13. The Mummy Returns (2001) The Mummy Returns is Johnson’s debut in a high-profile movie, and shamefully, he’s overshadowed by an infamously horrid CGI version of himself, who also sports giant crab legs for some reason. Granted, this is less a cameo than a teaser for a Mummy spin-off, but it’s a dismal use of a man who would quickly emerge as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Universal Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 12. Hercules (2014) In Hercules, Dwayne Johnson leads a band of mercenaries comprising a king-turned-prophet named Amphiaraus of Argos, a knife-wielding thief known as Autolycus of Sparta and the Amazon archer Atalanta of Scythia. So, there we go.
Paramount Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 11. Longshot (2001) In 2000, boy band impresario and future convicted fraudster Lou Pearlman wrote romantic comedy film Longshot that would covertly serve as a promotional tool for teen-pop acts on the Jive Records label at the turn of the millennium. As a result, Britney Spears and *NSYNC are among the stars roped in to provide cameos. As for Dwayne Johnson, in his cinematic debut, he gets 15 seconds of screen-time as an armed mugger swiftly pummelled to the ground by a late-1990s dreamboat with a ponytail who looks like someone who was this close to becoming a member of O-Town. Believability rating: zero.
Transcontinental Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 10. Pain & Gain (2013) Murder, kidnap, torture, extortion – it's hard to believe that Michael Bay's Pain & Gain is based on a true story by Pete Collins that was posted in Miami New Times in 1999. Well, that's because it's loosely based on real events with several of the film's key moments fabricated somewhat. Take, for instance, the scene in which Johnson's character robs an armoured truck and gets his toe shot off while escaping – entirely fictional.
Paramount Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 9. Fast & Furious 6 (2013) Most things are tamer than the fifth Fast & Furious film, but the franchise's sixth outing is not one of them largely thanks to a climactic scene that sees the crew tether their vehicles to a plane in order to stop it from taking off.
Universal Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 8. Fast & Furious 7 (2015) Johnson's character is mostly bedbound in Fast & Furious 8 so has to sit out most of the crew's hijinks, including a breathless sequence that sees them drop several cars from a plane while it's 10,000 feet in the air. Johnson is still handed the most ridiculous moment, though: watching his friends thrown into danger on a hospital television, he decides enough is enough and breaks out of his cast – by tensing his muscles.
Universal Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 7. Rampage (2018) Rampage puts its plot forward so sincerely that, while watching it, you almost forget how ridiculous the whole thing is. Johnson plays primatologist Davis Okoye who must team up with an enormous albino gorilla to stop a mutated wolf and crocodile from wreaking destruction on the world.
Warner Bros Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 6. Skyscraper (2018) The one Dwayne Johnson movie just too absurd for audiences, in that it was one of his few box office bombs in recent years, Skyscraper descended new heights of improbability. Johnson’s one-legged security guard is the Bruce Willis of this 255-floor spin on Die Hard, whose most sensational feat involves climbing a 96-story crane, running along its extension and then leaping into the burning skyscraper nearby that happens to have trapped his family inside. It gets believability points for recruiting Neve Campbell as Johnson’s nicely age-appropriate wife, but otherwise is a logistical disaster. Mythbusters would need an entire season of episodes to get to the bottom of it.
Universal Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 5. Fast & Furious 5 (2011) With just one car chase, Fast & Furious 5 was the film that reinvented the franchise. Gone were the street races of the series' earlier instalments in favour of higher stake-storylines, such as the bank heist at the heart of this film. It culminates in one of the most entertaining sequences in action film history – the crew dragging a giant vault through the city of Rio and using it to take out the police cars chasing them.
Universal Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 4. San Andreas (2015) Shortly after her sister-in-law Kylie Minogue plummets off the edge of a collapsing building, Carla Gugino clambers to safety by leap-frogging her way onto various pieces of falling debris until she manages to reach her ex (Johnson) in the helicopter he is piloting above her. It is somehow not the most ludicrous moment in the film. San Andreas takes a very believable disaster-movie scenario (the collapse of the San Andreas Fault), and then Dwayne Johnsons it. He’s an agreeably solemn hero here (San Andreas is more Sans Quipping, in truth), but everything around him is peak insanity.
Warner Bros Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 3. Fast & Furious 8 (2017) The writers of Fast & Furious, forced to outdo each other with every new film, threw two outlandish sequences into the eighth instalment. One involved a nuclear submarine (of course) and the other was a lengthy prison riot that tracked Johnson's character's escape from high-security lockup alongside Jason Statham's Deckard Shaw.
Universal Pictures
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 2. Tooth Fairy (2010) When someone told Dwayne Johnson to become a household name by going down the family film route, he really listened. In 2010, he played a minor-league hockey player who, after telling his daughter that the tooth fairy doesn't exist, is sentenced to one week as the actual tooth fairy.
20th Century Fox
Dwayne Johnson films in order of least to most ridiculous 1. Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) One day, not too long ago, it would have been difficult to think that the Fast & Furious franchise would feature *ahem* Jason Statham in the co-leading role, a literal walking terminator (played by Idris Elba, no less) and Dwayne Johnson lassoing a helicopter with a chain from a moving truck... but here we are.
Universal Pictures
Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw is in cinema now
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