Nobody was less enthusiastic than me about the prospect of The Rock becoming an action movie star, but on the evidence of this one and his previous The Scorpion King, he seems to have, at the very least, a good eye for choosing projects that deviate from the bloated blockbuster norm. (Let me interject that I am, however, in favor of movies with good titles. The Scorpion King is a fine title. The Rundown is a stupid, non-descriptive one. According to the Internet Movie Database, the working title last year was Helldorado, and that's obviously much better. If you're reading this, Rock, take a note.)

Director Peter Berg's previous Very Bad Things was a nasty little indie calling card that I wouldn't have thought held the key to a subsequent Hollywod career. But he turns out to be well suited to The Rundown's unpretentious, insconsequential stylings. No, The Rundown isn't as clever as it thinks it is. Some of the jokes fall a little flat, and the hyped-up editorial technique seems tailored to eliminate the need to actually cut scenes that hold together in film space. Plus, the presence of Seann William Scott outside the context of the kind of mildly obnoxious comedy where he learned his craft starts to grate.

But the good stuff is really good, particularly an opening sequence that borrows graphic design ideas from football video games as it leads into an inevitable ass-kicking administered by The Rock. And some of the bizarre flourishes are laugh-out-loud funny. (Check out the Christopher Walken inserts during the climactic action sequence.) Besides being funny and violent, it's impressively politically correct — Scott is the token white guy playing second-fiddle to a Samoan/African-American pro wrestler and the chocolate-skinned Rosario Dawson, who leads a rebel insurgency against old white man Walken's systematic, unmistakably capitalistic exploitation of native workers in the film's Brazilian setting.

The storyline is refreshingly simple; Scott and Dawson are after the same artifact for ideologically incompatible reasons, while The Rock is chasing Scott because he's paid to (and because he longs to get out from under the thumb of his boss). The most glaring inconsistency is probably the difference between The Rock's demeanor and the script's depiction of his character. "You're a very unpleasant man," someone tells him, but in fact nothing could be farther from the truth. The Rock is an absolutely genial, well-dressed superman for the new century, the kind of guy who lets you know that it's nothing personal before he kicks your ass, and who takes in said beating only the professional pleasure of someone who's well paid for what he does. In fact, The Rock's two films to date suggest sort of an antidote to the ouevre of Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose best films approached Wagnerian extremes of violence and exhibited a chilly cynicism befitting someone calling himself "the terminator." The Rock is soft-spoken and conflicted in a way that may signal an agreeable career trajectory akin to that of, say, Jackie Chan — or that may simply be the PG-13 calm before the R-rated storm.