Movie Review ~ ‘Snitch’

By Bob Garver

“Snitch” is the epit­ome of a “star vehi­cle”. In this case the star is Dwayne John­son. There is no rea­son to see “Snitch” other than Dwayne John­son. I’ve seen some movies lately that offer zero rea­sons to see them, so it’s fair to say that Dwayne John­son is bet­ter than noth­ing. Still, this movie was made entirely as an excuse to put Johnson’s face on a vaguely thrilling poster and get his fans into a the­ater to see some­thing, any­thing, star­ring their champion.

If I could describe the mood of the film in one word, it would be “wor­ried”. Johnson’s char­ac­ter John Matthews wor­ries about his son Jason (Rafi Gavron), who has been arrested on a drug charge that car­ries a ten-year prison sen­tence. The rest of the fam­ily wor­ries about Jason too. John wor­ries as he meets with a crusty pros­e­cu­tor (Susan Saran­don) who won’t lift a fin­ger for Jason unless she gets some leads on some big­ger crim­i­nals. So John goes under­cover for the DEA to catch drug deal­ers, which means he has to worry about being dis­cov­ered as a snitch. He learns that a dan­ger­ous car­tel knows where he lives. Now he has to worry about the rest of his fam­ily. He enlists the help of a friend named Daniel (Jon Bern­thal) to get him a meet­ing with a drug lord (Michael K. Williams) and we get some scenes of Daniel wor­ry­ing about his and his family’s safety. When it begins to look like John is in dan­ger, the other char­ac­ters worry about him. Jason is wor­ried him­self, of course, but he’s tak­ing too many prison beat­ings in the present to worry much about the future. Nat­u­rally it’s the bad guys who don’t do a whole lot of worrying.

It was prob­a­bly all the scenes of worry that attracted John­son to the part. He’s clearly try­ing to prove that he’s more than just an action star and I imag­ine he saw the vul­ner­a­ble char­ac­ter as an oppor­tu­nity to stretch as an actor. We see early on that he can han­dle emo­tional, dra­matic scenes. And then we see him han­dle a sim­i­lar emo­tional, dra­matic scene. And another and another. Yes he’s good in these scenes and yes they’re dif­fer­ent from the types of scenes he usu­ally plays, but there’s very lit­tle vari­ety in these scenes rel­a­tive to each other.

I can­not stress how dis­ap­pointed you will be if you go into “Snitch” expect­ing an action movie. John­son loses the film’s only fist­fight to a bunch of punks and dri­ves away from a car­tel shootout. All we really get is a crummy car chase at the end that was seem­ingly tacked in when some­body real­ized that the film was unfor­giv­ably short on car chases.

The release of “Snitch” coin­cides with Dwayne Johnson’s return to pro wrestling as the ever-popular WWE Super­star known as The Rock. The Rock even won the WWE Cham­pi­onship back in Jan­u­ary. I’m writ­ing this arti­cle on the night of the Oscars, and it occurs to me how sim­i­lar wrestling titles are to Acad­emy Awards. Both are sym­bols that rec­og­nize the holder as the great­est in their field. But nei­ther really, objec­tively means any­thing. Nei­ther is actu­ally earned by best­ing com­pe­ti­tion, but rather awarded by a tiny group of one’s peers based on what­ever cri­te­ria they choose. Both eas­ily have the poten­tial to be deval­ued; a wrestling title if it’s put on a wimp, an Oscar if it’s awarded to a ham or a hack. Dwayne “The Rock” John­son should be sat­is­fied with his wrestling titles, because I don’t see him win­ning an Oscar any­time soon. I know he means well with “Snitch”, but the film is monot­o­nous and uninteresting.

One and a Half Stars out of Five.

“Snitch” is rated PG-13 for drug con­tent and sequences of vio­lence. Its run­ning time is 112 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Feb 25 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.