Faster (2010)

An ex-con (Dwayne Johnson) systematically hunts down the four guys who murdered his brother, all with two cops (Billy Bob Thornton and Carla Gugino) and a hitman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) on his tail. A straight-faced homage to the kind of 70's guy-with-a-gun movies that Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino have canonized, Faster grafts that genre's style onto a deadbeat script and leaves it to Johnson — as deadly focused as a gunsight — to make it all believable. The problem is, he can't: The artist formerly known as The Rock has spent so many years undercutting his own tough-guy image (see: Tooth Fairy, The Game Plan), you half expect him to wink every time he pulls the trigger. D

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