Central Intelligence

Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber

Year: 2016

Runtime: 107 minutes

Rating: 4/10

“I got a plan. It might get us both killed, but if it works it’ll be a totally boss story.”

Central Intelligence is a big, bland, stupid movie. When people adopt despairing voices to lament the quality of generic Hollywood flicks, they’re thinking of movies like this. Central Intelligence’s only redeeming quality is Dwayne Johnson, whose tsunami of charisma almost overcomes the film’s soullessness.

Helmed by Rawson Marshall Thurber of Dodgeball (2004) fame, the film opens twenty years in the past, as an extraordinarily fat kid, Robbie Weirdick (Johnson), sings and dances energetically in a school’s gym shower. Some cardboard bullies appear, grab Weirdick, and throw him into the gym hall where a graduation ceremony is underway. The ceremony is a continuous set-up for the school’s rocket ship of awesomeness, Calvin Joiner (Kevin Hart). When Weirdick is catapulted onto the wooden floor and slide over its polished surface, Joiner is in the middle of giving a speech in response to being crowned the student with the most promising future. Cut to twenty years later. Joiner is now an accountant thoroughly disappointed by how average his life turned out. Weirdick, meanwhile, has changed name to Bob Stone, become a CIA agent, and transformed himself into a The Rock-shaped Greek God. Stone is believed to have killed his partner, and soon enlists Joiner (much against Joiner’s will) to help clear his name and find out what really happened.

The film’s 107 minutes are an even mixture of comedy and action. There’s plenty of laughs, especially when the film leans into its weirdness*, or pulls out one of its surprise cameos, but the action scenes are staged and shot so dully your mind starts yawning halfway through them. In terms of plot, it’s also the drama/comedy aspect that works. Early on the film teases what could’ve been an interesting exploration of being disappointed with your life, of peaking early and fearing life will never be as good, but any thematic follow-through on this is drowned out by the mind-numbingly predictable and by the numbers CIA-plot.

*The punch line of my favourite joke in the film is “Snake Gyllenhall.” That one really killed me. Also, there’s a good running gag about Stone’s abilities to suddenly disappear/appear, much like Batman does in Nolan’s films. The film also harvest some good laughs in clever dialogue-exchanges between its main characters, particular a continous joke on the classic “are you in or out?” 

Central Intelligence’s thematic center becomes Bob Stone’s relationship to his body. After his trauma in the gym hall, he’s never been able to be naked in front on another person. By the end, however, at their high school reunion, he happily goes full monty. But for this to show psychological development within Stone’s character, or for the film to use this to comment on society’s absurd body ideals, Stone would’ve had to still be overweight. The film’s message seems to be: “Be proud of your body…. If you look like The Rock.” In the opening scene, when Stone was fat, the film made fun of him. The opening scene screams: Look at this fat kid dancing in the shower, isn’t it hilarious? The film wants to have a positive vibe and espouse healthy values, but it’d rather just have you laugh at whatever is easiest to make fun of.

I have two theories of how this film came to be. The first is that the creators watched the recent, brilliant, remake of 21 Jump Street (Lord & Miller, 2012), and decided to rip it off as much as they could without getting sued. Central Intelligence follows the exact same structure: It begins with a flashback to a when our main characters were in highschool, establishes one as dork and the other as mr. popular, then flashes forward to the present when they end up as an unlikely team, with reversed roles in terms of life success. But 21 Jump Street’s success is 80% due to Lord and Miller’s spectacular directing; this film gives you an idea of what 21 would’ve been if a robot had directed it.

My second theory of how this came to be is that some suits had a few beers Friday night, and started making puns based on Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart’s names. They then proceeded to make a film with these actors just to use said puns in the advertising.

Dwayne Johnson saves this film from being a total train wreck; his portrayal of Bob Stone is just weird enough to be interesting. Johnson is inhumanly charming, and seems incapable at being boring in front of a camera, regardless of the quality of the film he’s in. Central Intelligence is by no means the worst film ever made, it’s just the sort of disheartening throwaway flick that makes you wish the average Hollywood film was a bit better.

Links:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1489889/combined

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/central_intelligence/

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/central-intelligence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=centralintelligence.htm