Review: "The Tooth Fairy"
Why hasn’t The Rock evolved into a bigger movie star?
Dwayne Johnson has a surfeit of charisma and the body builder looks of a younger Schwarzenegger or Stallone that makes him perfectly suited for the action-adventure genre. He may not be Brando, but he’s not a terrible actor either. He seems to have a decent sense of humor about himself. But he hasn’t quite broken through to the A-list of action stars.
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because he jumped into the winking, self-aware action-comedy genre a little too quickly. Whereas previous macho men like Schwarzenegger made an entire career of the tough guy role (think Conan the Barbarian, Terminator, Commando, etc.) before jumping into the tough-guy-cum-comedian role (think Kindergarten Cop, Twins, etc.), Johnson has tried to short circuit that route: There was The Scorpion King and Doom, sure, but that’s about it. Instead he seems to want to go right into the role of the lovable tough guy with a funny bone,.
Despite some successes within the paradigm (he was very good in The Rundown, for example), this shift is problematic: You need to build up some credibility as a bruiser before it becomes funny to subvert audience expectations by playing the joker. In order for the reversal to work, guys like Johnson and Schwarzenegger have to build up a reputation as a bruiser as solid as their pectorals. Arnold Schwarzenegger taking a kindergärtner to the potty is twice as funny because he spent the previous decade dropping bad guys off of cliffs.
The Tooth Fairy is the latest from Johnson: A washed up enforcer (nicknamed the Tooth Fairy) killing time and crushing wingers in hockey’s minor leagues, Derek Thompson (Johnson) has created a nice little life for himself. He’s got a great girlfriend (Ashley Judd) whose two kids are pretty cute. Sure, it might take a while for Carly’s son Randy (Chase Ellison) to warm up to Derek, but you know it’s coming; her daughter, Tess, loves the big galoot right away. When Tess loses a tooth, Derek takes it upon himself to let her know that the tooth fairy isn’t real.
The tooth fairies don’t like that, however. Derek is summoned to serve time as a tooth fairy for “dissemination of disbelief”; he must travel from house to house taking teeth and leaving dollar bills, employing magical fairy dust and the like in order to get the job done. You can see all the gags coming a mile away. You could probably write half of the movie now, at your computer, waiting for your lunch hour to roll around.
When the movie succeeds, it does so because of the work of supporting actors like Stephen Merchant, who plays Derek’s fairy case worker and Julie Andrews, who plays Derek’s fairy godmother. Merchant, in particular, is brilliant: The wry British comedian is probably best known to American audiences as Ricky Gervais’ bumbling manager in the BBC/HBO show Extras. He brings the same gangly awkwardness to this role, as well as excellent comic timing and what appears to be a decent flair for improvisational riffing.
It’s not enough to save this picture, unfortunately. Fine for the kids, The Tooth Fairy doesn’t offer much in the way of entertainment for the adults in the audience.