Although he may have suffered a couple of notable setbacks recently, Dwayne Johnson still reigns supreme as one of the biggest and most popular stars in all of Hollywood. He’s made a couple of great movies, a few good ones, plenty that could generously be dubbed mediocre, and a handful of true stinkers, but the identity of his least popular feature ever comes as something of a shock.
It isn’t an action-packed blockbuster, a high-profile sequel, or even one of his ill-fated ventures into family-friendly comedy. Instead, it’s 2013’s forgotten crime thriller Empire State that ranks as the single lowest-rated movie of The Rock’s entire career in terms of its Rotten Tomatoes user rating.
An audience approval rating of 24 percent puts it right at the very bottom of the pile, and it’s not even close. In fact, his next three bottom-rated flicks are the interminable video game adaptation Doom, The Mummy Returns spin-off The Scorpion King, and animated failure Planet 51, which boast respective scores of 34, 37, and 40 percent.
Is Empire State really that bad? Well, it’s not an egregiously awful affront to the good name of cinema, but it’s about as by-the-numbers and formulaic as the genre can possibly hope to be. Liam Hemsworth and Michael Angarano plot an elaborate heist to rob an armored truck’s money stash, with Johnson’s veteran NYPD detective tasked to bring them to justice, and that’s about it.
Regardless of its unwanted status among his back catalogue, though, FlixPatrol naming Empire State as one of the most-watched films on Starz this week underlines that the hulking ex-wrestler’s name alone is more than enough to entice viewers.