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75Like every other action movie, it's designed for a 14-year-old boy's mentality, but it's enjoyable enough to turn most people into 14-year-old boys.
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70The Scorpion King, so far from perfect it isn't funny, is nevertheless one of those movies that catches you up in something bigger than yourself, namely, an archetypal desire to enjoy good trash every now and then.
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70Director Chuck Russell ("The Mask") keeps the computer effects to a minimum, emphasizing instead the essential ingredients of a Saturday-afternoon serial, namely, venom-tipped arrows, pissed-off cobras and a buxom babe.
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70Rouses excitement mostly from stuntwork and thesp agility rather than CGI excess.
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70Chuck Russell doesn't make masterpieces -- he makes good B movies ("The Mask," "The Blob"), and The Scorpion King more than ably meets those standards.
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63Here is a movie that embraces its goofiness like a Get Out of Jail Free card.
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63Has been fine-tuned for adolescent boys, from the hectic pace right down to the way Cassandra's breasts are always barely draped.
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60The film is dumb, formulaic, the other actors are scarcely worth mentioning, and the plot is merely an excuse to set up the action scenes. But it didn’t bore me; The Rock is ceaselessly entertaining.
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60The movie itself is a live-action cartoon, a fast-moving and cheerfully simplistic 88 minutes of exaggerated action put together with the preteen boy in mind.
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60Within the limitations of the genre, the film succeeds fairly well, with enough giddy sophomoric humor, stunning fights, titillating sex, and exotic sets and costumes to keep an audience entertained.
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58Isn't incompetent; it's just plodding and obvious. If anything holds it together, it's The Rock's ironic ability to tread lightly, which the movie is neither fast nor inventive enough to recognize as different from the spirit of Arnold.
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58The Rock manages to play both with a crude candor more genuine than the entertaining if contrived spectacle around him, and a surprising big-screen charisma and ease that makes him a natural-born screen hero.
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50A dumb movie, but it's also a knowing one: a cheap castle of lewd trivia and corny excitement built on The Rock.
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50The good news about The Scorpion King is that The Rock turns out to be a charismatic, ingratiating screen presence.
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50Of course, The Rock looks the part, though with a headband and buckskin, he'd also look like Tonto on steroids.
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50For a movie with such a misplaced sense of history, The Scorpion King seems afraid to have more fun with its own stupidity.
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50It is possible to make an engaging action/adventure picture of this sort, but The Scorpion King isn't it. The movie isn't godawful, but it's far from inspired, and, as I sat through its 90 minute running length, I found my mind wandering.
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50The style here is much more in the spirit of the smash and slash of the Conan movies than the banter and computer-generated monsters of the Mummy movies.
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50The Rock isn't always comfortable delivering dialogue. He's handsome, physically sculpted and farther along dramatically than Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Conan the Barbarian," but he's still learning the simple acting skills an action hero needs.
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50It's impossible to overstate how deeply dumb all of this is, but it skims along at a brisk clip and manages not to overdo the nudge-nudge, wink-wink humor.
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50Prototypical summer-movie fare, designed to be consumed, enjoyed, and forgotten all at once.
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40Predictably dumber than its predecessors, though that shouldn't get in the way of its profitability.
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38Plays like Abbott and Costello Meet Conan the Barbarian.
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33Bang-bang, kiss-kiss, yawn-yawn. While dull death metal churns on the soundtrack, Johnson engages in one big brawl after another.
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30Director Chuck Russell lacks the visual panache, the comic touch, and perhaps the budget of Sommers's title-bout features, which refined a historically grounded B-movie sensibility into pure, gasp-inducing entertainment.
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The movie doesn't stink exactly, but it comes dispiritingly close.
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30Ultimately undone by its sheer busyness. The screenwriters never get the story to settle down, and it becomes a case of one damn thing after another.
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25Unfortunately, Scorpion King has none of the qualities -- epic sweep, relative originality and heartfelt bloodthirstiness -- that made "Conan" so trashily entertaining.
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20For all the swords 'n' sandals hoodoo that makes up the wilting backbone of Jonathan Hale's script, the Rock is, nevertheless, fun to keep an eye on.
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10As this chaotic barrage of muscle flexing, swordplay, fireballs, crude digital effects and comic-book quips hurls itself off the screen, it's like having several garbage cans clogged with stale pizza, lukewarm cola, soggy French fries and greasy, ketchup-stained napkins emptied over your head.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 31
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Mixed: 3 out of 31
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Negative: 11 out of 31
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KevinJ.10I liked this movie
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