DVD Review: THE RUNDOWN

by David Blackwell

Beck (The Rock) is a retrieval expert. He is hired to bring back Travis (Seann William Scott), a mob boss's son, back to Los Angeles. Beck travels to the Amazon and finds Travis in the town of Helldorado. The town is run by a greedy mining corporation controlled by Hatcher (Christopher Walken). Beck and Travis reluctantly team up to find a priceless treasure while Hatcher's men search for them because Hatcher wants the treasure too.

THR RUNDOWN isn't a bad way to waste 100 minutes. It may not have the most solid plot, but it does have some great action sequences and some humor including the baboon buit. The Rock and Christopher Walken shine in this movie while Seann William Scott just irritates me. Early in the movie has a cameo from none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. There is a little bad CGI in this movie, but thankfully you don't see it for long.

The movie is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. The colors are good. There is no visible grain or visible artifacts. I didn't even spot a layer change during the movie (like I can spot on DVDs from Columbia). The audio is good. The music doesn't drown out the dialogue. The English track is in 5.1 Dolby Digital while the French and Spanish tracks are only Dolby 2.0.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

There are 13 1/2 minutes of deleted scenes and most of the deleted stuff is from the last third of the movie including a fight scene with Seann William Scott that was cut from the movie. Most of the stuff was cut to streamline the movie.

RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE is a featurette about the movie's stuntwork that includes footage of the actors rehearsing the stunts before the movie was shot. Next up is THE AMAZON, HAWAII-STYLE that talks about why they shot the jungle scenes in Hawaii. APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION is a 8 1/2 minute featurette that looks at the explosions and visual effects they did in this movie (and a cow stampede).

THE RUNDOWN UNCENSORED is a light hearted and humorous featurette about the Camille the baboon that jumps on the Rock in the movie. WALKEN'S WORLD is all about Christopher Walken. RUNNING DOWN THE TOWN is about how they built the jungle town outside of Los Angeles and how they tried to make it look like small jungle towns in Brazil. Rounding out the special features are extensive bios on the major cast and crew of the movie, and extra stuff accessible by DVD-ROM (quite disppointing due to the fact it's only a short video with Seann William Scott joking around. There's pages upon pages of material in the Cast and Filmmaker Bios.

Now I come to the commentary tracks. There are two of them: one with director Peter Berg and The Rock, and the other with producers Kevin Misher and Marc Abraham. Both tracks offer some insight into the production of the movie, but I found the producers commentary more interesting to listen to and that track provided some even more useful info on the production than the other track. The producers commentary wasn't boring and there was less gaps. Maybe the other commentary track didn't quite work is that it has something to do with the director or The Rock.

If you liked this movie when you saw it last year or a fan of the two main actors, this is one you want to own in your collection. If you're looking for a good action comedy, it is worth a rental.