Dwayne Johnson's Best And Worst Movies

The highest-paid male star for two years running, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has starred in a number of widely beloved — and hugely successful — movies over the course of his acting career. Confounding expectations established by his past as a football player and wrestling star, Johnson's film projects have ranged widely, taking him across genres from family-friendly movies to action thrillers or comedies and everything in between.

Of course, no movie star has an unblemished track record. Just as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis have had their fair share of misses, so too does Johnson. And as with his most acclaimed works, Johnson's most criticized features also span a variety of genres. With all that in mind, here's a look back at the five best and worst movies of Johnson's career. How many have you seen — and how many rank among your own personal favorites? It's hard to go wrong where the Rock is concerned, but read on to find out.

"The guy who once cracked vertebrae in the wrestling ring... is now hell-bent on becoming your kid's favorite film star," wrote Christine Spines of Entertainment Weekly about Dwayne Johnson in June 2008. In The Tooth Fairy, Johnson played a hockey player who is forced to work as a — you guessed it — tooth fairy after crushing the dreams of a child. He's headlined numerous kid's movies, but none as disastrous as this one.

"This silly story and barely there comedy is about as enjoyable as a root canal," said Claudia Paig of USA Today. Some critics offered a more measured, albeit still negative, assessment of the project. "For a bad, broad comedy, Tooth Fairy boasts a surprising number of positives. Which isn't to say that it's good, but it could be much, much worse," remarked Tasha Robinson of the A.V. Club.

In the years since Tooth Fairy, Johnson has returned to live-action family films for Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, but otherwise, he's been firmly planted in the domain of PG-13 action films. However, that doesn't mean Tooth Fairy hasn't had any ripple effects on Johnson's later works. In fact, it introduced him to Stephen Merchant, who would go on to direct the Johnson-produced wrestling drama Fighting with my Family.

Video game movies don't have the best track record with critics, and Dwayne Johnson's 2005 Doom adaptation didn't buck that trend. Based on the video game series of the same name, Doom sees a group of soldiers, led by Asher "Sarge" Mahonin (Johnson), being sent to retrieve data from a recently attacked research facility on Mars. When they arrive, Mahonin and his team discover that monstrous creatures are running violently amuck on the planet. Karl Urban and Rosamund Pike co-star.

Doom opened in October 2005 to scorn from critics and longtime Doom fans alike. Achieving just a 19% critics score and 34% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, Doom was described by Roger Ebert as being "like some kid came over and is using your computer and won't let you play." Ned Martel of the New York Times summarized Doom as a "claustrophobic mess of a movie [that] offers only carnage," while James Bernardelli of ReelViews referred to it as "a D-grade mess that's more a rip-off of Alien than an attempt to tell a compelling story."

In the years since its release, Johnson has joined in the chorus. "Not pointing to the scoreboard yet, but it seems we may have finally broken the dreaded video game curse," Johnson said on Twitter in April 2018 regarding early positive reviews for another of his game adaptations, Rampage. "And remember, I starred in the stinker Doom so I have lived the curse."

Paramount Pictures saw G.I. Joe: Retaliation as a chance to set a new course for the live-action G.I. Joe movies. "They wanted to do a reboot but not reboot because it was a sequel," Retaliation director Jon M. Chu told Superhero Hype. "A lot of people saw the first movie so we don't want to alienate that and redo the whole thing." Part of giving Retaliation its own identity was in hiring Dwayne Johnson to play the film's lead, a character named Roadblock.

A new cast and director couldn't make Retatliaion a hit with either critics or audiences — it earned lower critic and audience ratings than its predecessor, The Rise of Cobra. "It's massive, all the retaliation and the world saving stuff. And it's convoluted," Betsey Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times said of Retaliation's plot. "Frankly, no one should have to think that hard to keep up with the Joes."

While Dwayne Johnson has been dubbed "franchise viagra" by Uproxx for how he helped revive the Fast & Furious movies, he couldn't work that same magic with Retaliation. After this film, the G.I. Joe franchise went into a nearly decade-long slumber that's only being broken by the Snake Eyes standalone project. Unsurprisingly, Johnson has no involvement in that film — or any upcoming G.I. Joe projects.

Ten years after Get Shorty grossed over $115 million at the box office, a sequel entitled Be Cool emerged. Directed by F. Gary Gray, Be Cool follows Chili Palmer (John Travolta) breaking into the music industry. In his exploits, he meets a barrage of colorful characters, including a bodyguard named Elliot, played by Dwayne Johnson. Despite the presence of such big names, the critical acclaim that greeted Get Shorty in 1995 failed to materialize for Be Cool.

This follow-up hit a sour note for critics, who wound up giving it a 30% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Moira MacDonald of the Seattle Times observed that actors like Johnson were "all stranded in a screenplay that never congeals, shifting from character to character while trying desperately to find some traction." Meanwhile, Roger Ebert felt that Johnson was miscast in the part. "To have the Rock play a gay narcissist is not funny," Ebert noted. "Because all we can think about is that the Rock is not a gay narcissist."

Even Gray has distanced himself from Be Cool."I made some assumptions in thinking that movie was going to work," he told Deadline. "When I walked into Be Cool, it was rated R and then at the last minute in preproduction I was told, 'Well, you have to make this PG-13.'" Whatever the reason for its critical derision, Be Cool ended up being one of the worst reviewed films in Johnson's filmography.

Director Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko, Southland Tales features a large ensemble cast that includes Dwayne Johnson as former action star Boxer Sarantos, who resides in an alternate future where World War III has turned America into a surveillance state. With plot twists involving space-time continuum rifts, the film's as brazenly weird as it is ambitious.

Unfortunately, it isn't critically acclaimed. After a disastrous Cannes Film Festival premiere that saw viewers booing, the film achieved only a 39% critics score and a 41% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Tom Long of the Detroit News summed up Southland Tales as "immature, crude, poorly made and a waste of time," while Deeson Thomson of the Washington Post declared it to be "exasperatingly convoluted, self-amused and politically sophomoric."

In recent years, Southland Tales has garnered positive re-appraisals, including a Vice article entitled "Southland Tales Was Exactly Ten Years Ahead of Its Time" and a Washington Post piece by Hau Chau that argues Tales is "a vehicle that could show off [Dwayne Johnson's] arsenal of classic and oddball acting talents." Johnson himself has even come to the film's defense. "Disastrous is an understatement. I'm grateful for the few hard earned career lessons I learned in Cannes in 2006," Johnson tweeted out in response to a Los Angeles Times piece referencing Southland Tales' Cannes premiere as "disastrous." "But," he added, "art can be a wild and funny thing years later as its perception changes its reality."