Walking Tall
dir. Kevin Bray
MGM

As Chris Petit wrote in Time Out upon the film's release in 1973, the original Walking Tall is "as much as anything … about Nixon's silent majority." Based on Sheriff Buford Pusser's true-life crusade in small-town Tennessee, Walking Tall is a Western in which the protagonist (Joe Don Baker) uses a big stick to pound the hell out of casino operators, drug runners and prostitution ringleaders. An explicitly violent film — think Southern-fried Sam Peckinpah — Walking Tall's bar fights don't end in bloody lips and dislocated noses, but with deep gashes and broken limbs. Then there's the scene in which a 10-year-old Leif Garrett (yes, that Leif Garrett) marches through a hospital with a shotgun and loads it at his father's bedside, while a nurse looks on approvingly. Buford is by definition an antihero, but what's disconcerting, and ultimately disturbing, about Walking Tall is that he's treated as a straight hero.

That film's ethics can be seen in the exchange in which a corrupt judge declares that Buford knows nothing about the law, to which Buford merely replies, "I know the difference between a poor honest judge and a rich dishonest one." Walking Tall's approach to the law is summarized by a scene in which Buford invades the judge's private bathroom, with all the stall-less toilets facing each other, as if justice could be doled out in conference while everyone takes a shit. Sheriff Pusser doesn't bother with the "technicalities" of due process — there's no time for that crap, so he just runs over bad guys in his car or smacks them with his two-by-four of Justice. Walking Tall gets even more subtle in its ending, in which Buford's loving and loyal wife is shot dead and an angry post-funeral mob torches the craps tables — that, y'all, is cleaning up a one-horse town. Released in the messy aftermath of Vietnam, the film seemed to touch something desperate and sincere in the American psyche. As the desire to save the outside world waned, people were concerned about getting their homes back in order, and Walking Tall, with its single-minded determination, tapped into a Nixonian idea of justice and became one of the biggest hits of the decade.

The remake of Walking Tall retains the original's simplistic Western story while updating its political subtext. Remember the 2000 Republican National Convention, when the Rock asked an arena full of conservatives if they smelled what the Rock was cookin'? If the new Walking Tall is anything, it's a parable of neo-con justice. The Rock takes a four-by-four and chops through bureaucracy, due process, activist judges and such little technicalities as search warrants and Miranda rights to rid his boyhood home of gambling, drugs and strippers. Vigilante action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and the Governator are on Republican donor lists because the brand of justice in their films is, essentially, a conservative fantasia of law and order that dispenses with liberal ideas like "due process" and instead celebrates machismo. Part of the original's huge success can be attributed to its primacy. Sheriff Pusser doesn't exercise his second amendment rights, but instead wails on the morally corrupt with a Teddy Rooseveltian big stick. And so the burden of movie justice falls upon the broad shoulders of our wrestler hero, whose mission is to Rock Bottom evil into submission.

The remake opens with the Rock on a barge headed to an island in Puget Sound, navigating through thick fog and past foreboding half-sunken fishing boats in the harbor. To a remake of the Allman Brothers' "Midnight Rider," the Rock walks the streets of his rundown hometown, passing abandoned stores, check cashers and pawn shops, leaving the streets for half-buried railroad tracks and a railyard strewn with rusty box cars. The lumber mill closed three years ago, plunging the town into ruin. "It's simple economics," Sheriff Watkins tells the Rock. "But we've got a casino."

The issue here is simply economic: Why did the mill close? A lack of tarriffs to offset cheaper overseas lumber? Reduced personnel expenses in Canada because of lower health care costs? An undereducated workforce unable to adapt to the global economy? As the Rock would say, it doesn't matter why the mill closed — it's the free market at work, folks, and besides, what the hell kind of movie would that make? Not a very entertaining one, so the Rock takes a page from the Republican playbook: Go right after the moral issue. It turns out that the Rock's old rival Jay Hamilton (Neal McDonough) is running the casino. After a particularly brutal pickup football game, Jay offers the Rock and his friends a night at his oasis, "Drinks on the house, and a little female companionship if you need it."

Fair enough, but the Rock is suspicious. He takes Jay up on his offer, grabs a beer and takes in a private stripper show. When the stripper says, "Your voice sounds familiar," we find that, yes, his ex-girlfriend is working for tips and tips alone. Then, when the Rock spots loaded dice at the craps table, he takes matters into his own hands, taking out the casino's Keystone Kops by himself. To the inept security detail's credit, the Rock is tasered and then damn near disembowled and left for dead. But that's not the worst of it: His 10-year-old nephew is smoking weed and doing crystal meth. And so the Rock and his old buddy (Johnny Knoxville) decide not to "let this stand."

If the original Walking Tall was about Nixon's silent majority cleaning up the hippie mess, this Walking Tall is a mini-parable about the war on Iraq. In this scenario, the complicit, flaccid sheriff is in the United Nations role — in fact, the movie's sheriff tells the Rock that the casino is in a "no-fly zone." The Rock, meanwhile, is a Special Forces officer who doesn't wait for anyone to tell him it's OK to protect his homeland. He takes his case directly to the people, and then goes in and takes care of business. The movie is political in the way that crazy, low-profile spring movies are often political — like last year's Willard being a sort-of allegory for the war on terrorism (Tora Bora-brand poison is used to flush rats from the walls; Christopher Glover uses box cutters to break into his boss's office).

In fact, Walking Tall advocates for Extreme Tort Reform: When brought before a jury of his peers on criminal charges for his assault on the casino, the Rock doesn't plead guilty for a crime he committed in retaliation — he simply fires his lawyers and represents himself as an unstoppable force of morality. The Rock dispenses with all that lawyerly jazz like "questioning witnesses" ("We're not here for civics speeches," warns the judge, who clearly doesn't understand the movie's moral bent); instead, the Rock opens his shirt for the jury — not to wow the girls, but to show his scars. The Rock wins the day, and parlays the victory into an election to sheriff. Rather than a NASCAR dad, the Rock is more of a monster truck uncle: He rigs sirens to his jacked-up Chevy, grabs his four-by-four, and doles out some freakin' justice.

The film tries for a '70s cop movie feel, underscored by some refried southern rock covers and recalling some of the ultra-violence of that era's cinema. The skies of Walking Tall are perpetually overcast; director Kevin Bray tries to re-create the atmosphere of early Altman and Scorsese, but it seems inauthentic. The murky skies and dark tones of '70s movies underscored the era's moral ambiguity, but there's zero ambiguity in Bray's remake. That, and the Rock just doesn't seem to fit into rural Washington state. In the original, Sheriff Pusser deputizes his best friend, who becomes the first black deputy in the history of Tennessee. Not only was this true, but it's also consistent with the ethic that men should be judged on the content of their character — one of film's important contributions to the death of Jim Crow in the post-Civil Rights South. In the remake, the mixed marriage of the Rock's parents underscores the content-of-character theme, but because the actors (John Beasley and Barbara Tarbuck) don't look even remotely like their supposed son, the lesson doesn't really take.

Strictly as entertainment, Walking Tall fails because it doesn't play to the Rock's strengths. His persona is built on a combination of butt-kicking and comic timing, but Walking Tall only has a smattering of jokes. The Rock and Johnny Knoxville engage in some amusing buddy cop banter, but unlike The Rundown, the violence is graphic and often disturbing. Perhaps Walking Tall shouldn't have been the Rock's movie at all — it's much more of a Stone Cold Steve Austin movie. Unlike the Rock, Stone Cold is all business all the time, his enormous fame built on dispensing vigilante justice and stomping mudholes in authority. The Rock's Deion Sanders act is too smart-alecky for the film's tone, whereas Stone Cold would have marched through this movie just like he marches to the ring through broken glass. Here's an idea: Release the movie in September for a cross-promotional tie-in with the Republican National Convention. Surely Ed Gillepsie could schedule time for Stone Cold to tell the delegation that that's the bottom line, because Stone Cold said so.

But really, what is the bottom line of anti-hero parables like Walking Tall? Yes, the bad guys are locked up, and the town is restored to order. But even if one buys the eye-for-an-eye mentality of vigilante justice, this is where the story becomes fantasy. After the casino is destroyed and the drug operation is toppled, the mill magically opens again. But how? Wasn't "simple economics" why it closed in the first place, and why would simply decapitating the head of the vice operation end all corruption? Walking Tall's moral is that if we simply have the courage to "do what's right," then all will be right with the world. But isn't this a bit like Dick Cheney's assertion that we would be greeted as "liberators" in Iraq, with rose petals thrown at our soldiers' feet? The real world is much more complicated and nuanced than morality plays like Walking Tall would have you believe. Apart from the implausibility of the mill reopening and the town returning to its Eden-esque state, the violence is tittilating rather than revolting. At least in the original, Sheriff Pusser undergoes an internal crisis, wondering if he's gone too far — indeed, that movie is more than two hours, whereas the remake clocks in at less than 80 minutes. The Rock never asks that question, never engages in that kind of internal dialogue. Perhaps the ultimate lesson of all of this is in the true story of Sheriff Buford Pusser: Just a few months before he was to play himself in the sequel to Walking Tall, he was killed by a car bomb most likely intended for him.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)