After scantily clad turns in ''The Mummy Returns'' and ''The Scorpion King,'' The Rock must have been happy to get a part where he wears pants. But it wasn’t just the idea of skipping the tattered look that appealed to the onetime WrestleMania star: “I wanted to make sure the character I played was a strong, complex, interesting character.”
So in ''The Rundown'' he’s Beck, a bounty hunter on the verge of retirement. For his last job, he heads to an Amazon outpost to pick up a renegade -- ''American Wedding''’s Seann William Scott -- who’s searching for a valuable artifact. (Hawaii and a park in L.A. -- hyped up with CGI -- sub for the Brazilian-jungle mining town.) For Peter Berg, who’s directed only one other film, 1998’s dark comedy ''Very Bad Things,'' the big-budget adventure “was a big undertaking. But I ran a TV show [2000’s 'Wonderland'],” he adds, “and I think that was harder than anything. Along the way, I prepared myself for this.”
While Beck is a somewhat unorthodox hero -- he hates guns and really wants to open a restaurant -- Dwayne Johnson a.k.a. The Rock assures fans he hasn’t gone all soft. “If it’s possible to hit a guy and loosen his teeth, well, [my character wants] to knock them all out.”
The Killer Moment Scott and Johnson mistakenly ingest a jungle fruit that causes temporary paralysis (it's funny, not scary).
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