WWE Smackdown vs Raw (PS2) Hidden Wrestlers (7/9): The Rock gameplay

Gameplay of the hidden character/wrestler The Rock in Yuke’s/THQ’s WWE Smackdown vs Raw.

I want to talk about the Rock’s film career this time, mainly as Rocky’s peak was like…three, four years maximum? And he’s been a film star for far longer than he’s been a wrestler now, I think.

Indeed, I always find a bit weird to think of just how long The Rock has been a film star, and particularly how he effectively retired (or semi-retired anyway) from wrestling right around the end of the Attitude Era, partially being the reason it ended but also leaving something of a void back then which Vince seemed to really struggle to fill. It was quite novel to see The Rock in a film back when he was doing the Mummy/Scorpion King stuff, but now it’s almost weirder to think that he actually was a wrestler at one point.

I honestly can’t decide if I like The Rock as an actor or not. It’s the exact same issue I’ve found with Cena in his recent film roles (one of which includes Fast & Furious 9, of course), in the fact that they’re perfectly good actors, but there’s nothing all that standout about them. I finally watched through the Fast and Furious film series last year, where The Rock has been a mainstay since the fifth film as Luke Hobbs, even getting a spin-off with Jason Statham’s character Deckard Shaw, and while he’s pretty decent he does strike me as the kind of character who could be played by a bunch of other actors instead and it would work just as well, a problem which seems to be pretty ubiquitous in a lot of these big-budget Hollywood type of films.

Of course, the F&F series isn’t necessarily a really good measure for acting ability (it felt like every character got flanderised and one-dimensional after a while, especially when no one even stays dead for Christ’s sake), but The Rock nowadays just feels like a very safe choice when it comes for casting roles, which is weird given what a total whiplash he was to wrestling during his heyday. He’s in a bunch of films but I’d be hard pressed to name any of them which are particularly noteworthy, and most of them seem to be pretty forgettable blockbusters which you’ve also already forgotten about by this point.

It's also worth noting that, once an acting career was on the horizon, The Rock started receiving a major backlash from audiences as a result of it, which often seems pretty forgotten nowadays. He started getting regularly booed at events, to the point that he couldn’t even so much as cut a promo because the backlash was so fierce. It makes sense too, really; wrestling is a very a self-contained subculture which often seems to pride itself on the fact that it is this weird, self-contained thing with all this history and all these traditions, and anyone who uses the fame of wrestling to bolster other careers like acting is seen as a sell-out for effectively “using” the fans, as it were. It’s pretty well-founded too in all honesty; Hollywood essentially robs you of the wrestler as a result, someone you’ve put a lot of time and effort into supporting and following over the years.

Hell, it’s part of the reason Hogan was so detested yet made for a great heel as Hollywood Hogan; people hate those who see themselves as being “above” the business. That said, fans seem a lot more accepting of wrestlers taking up acting careers nowadays (or just accept that it’s inevitable, anyhow). It makes sense too; wrestling is just stunts and acting the majority of the time, when it comes down to it, not to mention vocal ability, and that effectively creates the right condition for a great actor, particularly an action star, not that we’ve actually had a lot of noteworthy examples barring Hogan, The Rock and Cena. And again, they’re established, and people know them, so it’s a pretty safe bet, most of the time anyhow. If they're towards the end of their career then it's less egregious, but if you look at a guy like Cena, who they clearly wanted to have some kind of actor-wrestler crossover pretty early on, a lot of his initial film roles were simply cameos, and him taking up acting towards the end of his career feels a lot more natural and acceptable. Rocky on the other hand only really had a few years at the top at the most (much like Austin of course), and that made it feel all the worse, particularly given how drastically and oddly wrestling changed from the end of the Monday Night Wars onwards.

Up next, it’s Isaac Yankem.