37 Best Dwayne Johnson Movies - The Rock's Complete Film List
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Every Movie Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson Has Made, From Best to Worst

It wasn't easy, but we did it.

By and Andy Crump
The Rock movies
MensHealth.com

Every year since 2001, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, The Most Electrifying Man in Sports Entertainment, The Great One, The People’s Champion, The Brahma Bull himself, has appeared in at least one movie, and some years in as many as five. That’s a lot of Rock saturation, which makes his continued vitality pretty darn amazing. And he's showing no signs of slowing down, as his starring role in the much-anticipated Black Adam is set to premiere in 2022. Plus, as of 2020, he's the highest paid actor in the world.

More amazing is that the guy’s popularity seems to increase with every calendar year. Maybe it’s his versatility. Like action? Most of his oeuvre is right up your alley. Love to laugh? He has comedies for days. Need a good old fashioned inspirational sports flick? The Rock will oblige. Want to watch Johnson cook body parts on a Weber? That’s...really specific, but what do you know, he’s got one of those in his back pocket, too!

Johnson, once upon a time the sum of his muscles, has revealed himself to be so much more than a chiseled god among men; he’s the rare leading man who can show up in bad-to-mediocre movies and give you a good reason to watch them, that reason being him. Admit it. When a new Johnson movie drops, your interest piques. There’s no shame in that. He’s one of the best. In fact, he's so good that MTV gave him the 2019 Icon Generation Award.

But if we're going to celebrate Johnson's best, that means we also have to sort through some of his worst. Here’s our ranking of every role in Johnson’s career, from bad to good.

#35: Jem and the Holograms, 2015

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Role: Cameo as himself

Johnson shouldn't take any meaningful responsibility for Jem and the Holograms. He’s so removed from the film’s plot, in fact, that merely mentioning it alongside the rest of his body of work feels wrong. Johnson’s cameo appearance is a matter of context: He shows up singing the praises of the title band via social media, but the clip is just a repurposed Vine in which he extolls the virtues of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” It’s an effortless walk-on (if you can even call it that), and a cheap way of capitalizing on Johnson’s stardom.

#34: Longshot, 2002

Role: Mugger

Lionel C. Martin’s Longshot is an amateur-level action-comedy amalgam and a late '90s/early 2000s nostalgia trip that qualifies as a movie only by the letter of the law. Bad as Longshot is — and it is very, very bad — its badness has nothing to do with Johnson, playing a mugger for less than a full minute of screen time before Joey Sculthorpe fights him off. Thankfully, it takes more than one crummy movie to keep The Rock from becoming arguably the biggest movie star on the planet.

#33: Tooth Fairy, 2010

Role: Derek Thompson/Tooth Fairy

All of the great action stars have a dumb kids movie listed on their filmography. It’s like weird a rite of passage. Arnold Schwarzenegger has Kindergarten Cop. Bruce Willis has The Kid. Vin Diesel has The Pacifier.

Johnson has Tooth Fairy, where he plays a hockey goon known for — get this — knocking out opposing players’ teeth on the ice. Unsurprisingly, he’s a total jerk off the ice, too — so much so that he’s turned into a toothy fairy by the tooth fairy race, ostensibly to become a better man. (He’s a pretty bad man. The dude steals a dollar from his girlfriend’s daughter and tells her tooth fairies don’t exist.) Think of this one as part of the price you pay to become an action hero.

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#32: Why Did I Get Married Too?, 2010

Role: Daniel Franklin

Yet another movie where Johnson doesn’t play much of a part in the actual story, and only walks on at the very end — in this case, showing up at the film’s climax to tell Patricia Agnew (Janet Jackson) that her books helped him get through his divorce. He thanks her, then asks her out for coffee, and that’s all, folks. The rest of the movie is a standard romantic drama about couples trying to improve their marriages to varying results, but in terms of The Rock, you’re probably better off just skipping it.

#31: The Mummy Returns, 2001

Role: Mathayus the Scorpion King

Whether or not Johnson’s role in The Mummy Returns really counts as “acting” is a debate worth having, but wherever you fall, this is hardly anyone’s idea of an auspicious debut; his big moment hinges on CGI so bad it’s nearly awe-inspiring, dated even by 2001 standards, and more so now. All Stephen Sommers did here is slap Johnson’s mug on a man-scorpion’s body. Granted, he does appear in full, shirtless glory in the movie’s opening scene, but given how he goes out, the whole thing feels like a wash.

#30: Empire State, 2013

Role: Detective James Ransome

Yet another Johnson movie where he barely has screen time. If we’re being honest, there are worse movies on this list, but few of them are as criminally generic as Empire State, and even fewer give him so little to work with. The film is built out of tropes deployed by director Dito Montiel without even the slightest hint of imagination: Two best buds with zero armed robbery experience cook up a plan to rob an armored truck outfit, and when they do, Johnson — playing a boilerplate hard-nosed detective — sets out to bring them to justice. Rather than lean into being terrible, Empire State settles on merely existing. It’s there. That’s about it. And Johnson’s scarcely there at all.

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#29: Baywatch, 2017

Role: Mitch Buchannon

Viewers may have delighted in seeing Johnson humiliate Zac Efron, but the problem with Baywatch as entertainment is laziness. The film is a naked attempt to capitalize on the success of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s 21 Jump Street reboots, and Seth Gordon is neither a Lord nor a Miller; he lacks their knack for turning bad ideas into great movies. Johnson made plain his disagreements with the film’s critics post-release; he’s a “stand behind the work” kind of guy, after all.

#28: Planet 51, 2009

Role: Captain Charles "Chuck" T. Baker

Planet 51 commits roughly the same faux pas as Empire State: It’s conventional to its own detriment. What the former has over the latter is Johnson, who voices the main character and therefore stays in the movie from start to finish. That’s an incredibly low bar, but it’s the bar we have to take from this stretch of Johnson’s career as a leading man.

Even if Planet 51 feels downright routine, it’s not exactly boring: Johnson plays a meathead astronaut who lands on a planet where the indigenous alien culture is modeled closely after 1950s American culture. You’ve seen films like it before, with well-rounded characters and more to say about its plot and themes.

#27: Southland Tales, 2006

Role: Boxer Santaros

All but the Donnie Darko faithful — the folks who fight tooth and nail for respect for Richard Kelly’s weirdo cult flick — embraced his 2006 follow-up, Southland Tales, which 12 years later is mostly notable as the only arthouse movie Johnson has to his name. Take his character’s backstory — “amnesiac action star becomes the most wanted man on the planet” — and you’ve more or less got a movie right there, but regrettably that conceit is stuffed into a movie overloaded with other similarly fascinating conceits. It’s ultimately unsuccessful, scarcely memorable, and chock-full of bizarre exchanges like, well, this one.

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#26: Doom, 2005

Role: Sgt. Asher "Sarge" Mahonin

Doom proves that video game movies generally don’t work, and also that Johnson is damn near bulletproof when it comes to his choice in roles. Again, we have an early entry in his filmography that might have sunk another actor, a half-cocked adaptation of the infamous first-person shooter that gets interesting only when it slips into first-person mode toward the end. Compare Karl Urban, the movie’s lead, to The Rock, playing only a supporting part, and you’ll get the idea. Urban’s not starving for work, but he’s not The Rock, either. (At least he has the honor of taking Johnson out at the end of the movie. Not many get to say that.)

#25: The Game Plan, 2007

Role: Joseph "Joe" Kingman

“Family friendly movies starring wrestlers can’t be good!” says Tooth Fairy. “Hold my beer,” says The Game Plan.

The Game Plan won’t blow your mind and redefine your definition of what great cinema looks like, but a) it’s not trying to, b) very few movies actually achieve that, and, most importantly, c) it’s watchable, which puts it head and shoulders above most movies like it. The Game Plan is pretty damn cloying, but Johnson carries the picture, predating the disaster that is Tooth Fairy by three years and making it look even worse by comparison.

#24: Race to Witch Mountain, 2009

Role: Jack Bruno

The movie equivalent of cotton candy: Fluffy, airy, and fun, but you'll forget all about it as soon as the credits roll.

A remake of the 1975 fantasy film of the same name (and more or less in name only), Race to Witch Mountain is a good time. It's about an erstwhile getaway driver for the mob who ends up smack-dab in the middle of an alien invasion plot, with two alien teens on one side, an alien assassin on another, and a government spook on yet another; it’s up to Johnson to help the teens prevent their race from attacking Earth and taking over the world. Sounds fun. And it is! It’s just predictable, and by dint of its predictability, it’s unremarkable despite its better merits.

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#23: Hercules, 2014

Role: Hercules

By the time Hercules came out, Johnson had two Fast & Furious films under his belt; he’d long proven himself as an action star capable of opening movies and carrying franchises. This is a nice way of saying Johnson didn’t really need Hercules on his resume, but middling and antiseptic though it may be, it has its fantasy genre pleasures, plus a good, steely turn from Johnson (and a great supporting cast, including Ian McShane). The more love you have for Roman mythology, the better the film plays.

#22: The Scorpion King, 2002

Role: Mathayus/Scorpion King

The Scorpion King feels like a redemptive feature — the spin-off follow-up to 2001’s The Mummy Returns. Granted, The Scorpion King isn’t a great movie either, but it’s tightly paced, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and relishes its genre as well as its retro evocations. If Chuck Russell had dropped this back in the '80s, millennials would probably look back on it fondly as a cheesy action/fantasy cornerstone of their childhood, like The Beastmaster.

#21: Be Cool, 2005

Role: Elliot Wilhelm

Be Cool is an example of a single performance holding up an entire movie. As a sequel to Barry Sonnenfeld’s superb 1995 crime comedy, Get Shorty, Be Cool disappoints; no one really asked for it, and ticket sales suggest that no one really wanted it once it opened, either.

But the film has a silver lining, and that lining has enormous muscles, inborn star power, and a real talent for arching his eyebrow. Be Cool isn’t a classic in Johnson’s filmography, but it’s demonstrative of his natural magnetism. As long as he’s on screen, the movie feels alive, practically crackling with comic energy. It may not have done well commercially, but it did wonders for his career, giving him a chance to prove his multidimensional acting chops. Turns out The Rock’s as much a funnyman as a tough guy.

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#20: Snitch, 2013

Role: John Matthews

You probably don’t remember Rich Roman Waugh’s Snitch, and for good reason. The film’s all over the place — a morality tale about betraying your friends to save your own skin that eventually turns into a cartel movie. The movie tries to slow-roll its way into a highway chase/shootout, giving Johnson room to explore new facets of his persona by ditching his usual hero routine to play the soft-spoken, introspective everyman, which in and of itself is fairly compelling. The problem is the movie giving Johnson little to hang onto, lacking a singular narrative identity. It’s inert and grueling, but as far as it concerns Johnson’s continued evolution, it’s a fascinating bit of homework.

#19: You Again, 2010

Role: Air marshal

In You Again, Kristen Bell's character finds out that her high school bully, played by Odette Yustman, is marrying her brother, which doesn’t sit well with her. Partway through the film she has a meltdown on an airplane and ends up being subdued by an air marshal, played by Johnson. Rather than play tough, though, he gives her a pep talk. It’s surprisingly sweet, but it doesn’t come as a surprise: The Rock’s a nice guy, and as we find out elsewhere in his body of work, he doesn’t tolerate bullies, either.

#18: G.I. Joe: Retaliation, 2013

Role: Marvin F. Hinton/Roadblock

Honestly, what holds G.I. Joe: Retaliation back — apart from Channing Tatum’s near-immediate demise toward the start of the movie — is retroactive in nature. Cool as it is watching Johnson mow down bad guys with a really, really big gun, 2015’s Furious 7 performed the same public service by arming him with an equally as big gun, and quite frankly, Furious 7 did it better.

It doesn’t help that G.I. Joe: Retaliation is a movie based on a toy and comic franchise. On top of that, the film’s as dumb as a stack of bricks — but thankfully, it knows it’s dumb, and never tries to dress itself up as intelligent.

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#17: Walking Tall, 2004

Role: Chris Vaughan

Walking Tall is a remake of the 1973 movie of the same name, a semi-biographical telling of the life and times of Sheriff Buford Pusser. The details of Pusser’s life change ever so slightly in the ‘73 film; they change even more in the 2004 version, Johnson playing Pusser as an ex-Special Forces type rather than an ex-wrestler (perhaps because having Johnson play an ex-wrestler would be too on the nose). Regardless of changes made to the story, Walking Tall works well enough as a showcase for Johnson’s gift for vibing with his co-stars, like Johnny Knoxville, cast here as his trustworthy best friend.

#16: Reno 911!: Miami, 2007

Role: Agent Rick Smith

There’s nothing quite like watching big tough guys make asses of themselves, or in this case blow themselves to kingdom come; Johnson has such a good understanding of how to blend his macho veneer with perfect comic timing that his moment here feels like a comedy all-timer. You know he’s not going to stay in the movie for long. Everything Reno 911! is about sheer incompetence, even from supporting characters, and Johnson nails that dynamic.

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