[COLUMN] Moana Features Dwayne Johnson Doing a Bad Dwayne Johnson Impersonation | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece discusses the new live action version of Moana, which is in theatres this weekend. It is impossible to spoil the new live action version of Moana, because it is a one-for-one adaptation of a movie everyone has already seen.

The weekend sees the opening of the live action reimagining of Moana.

This is an interesting event for a couple of reasons. Most obviously, although there is reportedly an adaptation of Tangled in the works, this is the first time that Disney has adapted one of its films that was made with computer-generated animation. It is also the most recent of Disney’s animated films to receive a pseudo-live action adaptation, with the only other adaptation based upon a film released this century being the recent Lilo and Stitch.

There is something striking in how ruthlessly efficient Disney has been in the “cultural fracking” around Moana, a film that grossed nearly $650 million worldwide and became the biggest movie on any streaming platform. Within a decade of the release of Moana, Disney has not just released a live-action remake but also cobbled together a sequel from an aborted streaming series that was beaten into the rough shape of a movie and released in theatres to earn an impressive one billion dollars.

This all happened so fast that it seems almost pointless to talk about the live action adaptation itself, because it has all the same problems as all the other similar live action remakes. The combination of translating something consciously designed to pop in animation into verisimilitudinous live action where the same elements won’t work as well coupled with a slavish fidelity to the source material that pushes the film into the uncanny valley results in a very hollow and very ineffective confection.

However, allowing for all of that, there is one particularly interesting consequence of this mo’, mo’, mo’ approach to Moana. Because all of this Moana material is so densely concentrated, it was possible for Disney to recruit Dwayne Johnson, who had voiced the character of trickster Maui in the animated Moana, to reprise the role in live action. After all, even at the age of 54, Johnson still has the body of a demigod. Johnson also offers star power, even if he is no longer “Franchise Viagra.”

Of course, this sort of recycling of an existing performer is not unheard of, particularly when the actor in question was properly iconic in the original animated role. James Earl Jones returned to voice Mufasa in Jon Favreau’s remake of The Lion King, for example, which was a perfect defensible choice. Gerard Butler, our meathead poet laureate, was quietly one of the best parts of both the animated and the live action adaptations of How to Train Your Dragon. It can be done.

More than that, Johnson was great in the original animated Moana. “You’re Welcome” is one of the best Disney songs of the past decade, in large part because Johnson commits to it. He pushes himself in ways he does not elsewhere in his filmography. The role of a vain and somewhat unreliable wannabe hero also played with Johnson’s hypermacho screen persona in franchises like Fast & Furious, where he would famously refuse to lose fights and refer to costars as “candy asses.”

Johnson is not always the most reliable of performers. He can be extremely protective of his screen image in a way that really hinders his ability to showcase his dramatic chops. Despite his tendency to appear in visual white noise like Jungle Cruise, Skyscraper or Black Adam, Johnson can deliver a compelling performance. While the movies themselves are nowhere near as good as the animated Moana, Johnson is great in Southland Tales, Pain and Gain and The Smashing Machine.

So, given how good he was in the animated Moana and the fact that he can deliver a good live action performance when he pushes himself, it is shocking how bad Dwayne Johnson is in the live action Moana. It is a limp and lifeless performance. If one were feeling hyperbolic, there is an argument to be made that somehow Maui in Moana is both Johnson’s best performance and his worst performance. Think of it as Schrödinger’s Rock.

To be fair, it is not as if these live action remakes have ever been great vehicles for performances. There are a couple of exceptions, like Christopher Walken in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book or those moments where Emma Stone gets to go full ham in Craig Gillespie’s Cruella, but the only one of these films where the performances feel noteworthy is Pete’s Dragon, which features wonderful work from Robert Redford, Bryce Dallas Howard, Karl Urban, Wes Bentley and more. However, that had the luxury of being a complete ground-up reinvention rather than a simple remake.

The one-to-one translation of animation into live action does Moana few favors, but it does even fewer for Johnson. Because Johnson is delivering many of the same lines and jokes in live action that he did in his original voice over performance, it is impossible not to measure the performances against one another – from the monologue he delivers about his tragic back story late in the film to the glee with which he delivers that exclamation “boat snack!” on grabbing Hei Hei the Rooster.

One of the big problems with the live action performance is how rigid it feels. It is entirely possible that Johnson felt more liberated playing Maui in animation, in a voice over role, where not only would the character’s physicality be rendered by animators but also where his face and body would not appear on screen. It perhaps allowed a bit of distance between Johnson and the character, which allowed an actor who can be very anxious about how he is presented on screen feel more playful.

In this context, it is worth noting that Johnson is not the only actor reprising their role from the original animation. The other big returning star is comedian and musician (and comedic musician) Jermaine Clement, playing the glam crab Tamatoa and reprising his own memorable musical number “Shiny.” It is not an especially brilliant performance. It is largely Clement re-reading and re-recording his voiceover from the original film, down to the same jokes, but it is at least functional.

So there is a difference between performing in voice over and performing in live action. While there are actors who are very good at doing both – Tom Hanks comes to mind – they are different skillsets. And while Johnson is primarily known as a live action performer, it can feel like part of what made his voiceover work as Maui so special was that it activated or employed a different set of tools for the actor than his live action roles, and it is not possible to directly translate that into live action.

This gets at the other and more fundamental issue with Dwayne Johnson’s performance, which is another manifestation of the folly of this project of adapting animated movies so literally and directly into live action. To put it simply, Dwayne Johnson’s performance in the live action Moana exists in the uncanny valley. It is Dwayne Johnson doing an impersonation of Dwayne Johnson. It is Dwayne Johnson cosplaying as Dwayne Johnson. It is the artist as an echo of themselves.

Watching Johnson on screen, trying to match a physical performance to a voice-over performance that he gave almost a decade ago, the mind wanders to Irish Times film critic Donald Clarke’s astute observation about Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s central performance in his own biopic, Jim Sheridan’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’, remarking that the rapper was “badly miscast in the role of himself.” In Moana, Dwayne Johnson feels miscast in the role of Dwayne Johnson.

Johnson’s performance in the animated Moana was its own creation. It was the product of the actor at a particular point in his career, working in a different medium. It was fresh and exciting. A large part of what made Johnson’s original take on Maui was how exciting and fresh it felt, sandwiched between Central Intelligence and The Fate of the Furious. It was like watching a performer unlock something new.

In contrast, Johnson’s live action interpretation of Maui is the exact opposite. It is a recreation of something that Johnson did at another point in his career and at another moment in his life. It lacks the spontaneity and the discovery of playing Maui all those years ago. Part of the commitment to faithfully recreating the animated movie is that the original is carved in stone. Johnson cannot make any choices in his performance. He has no real agency.

Not to get too deep into the craft of acting, but one of the reasons why Marlon Brando is generally regarded as a pioneer in terms of the artform – to the point that Ethan Hawke argues that Nicolas Cage is “the only actor since Marlon Brando that’s actually done anything new with the art of acting” – is that he understood the difference between theatre and cinema. In theatre, acting is an extremely technical craft, with actors delivering calibrated performances every night.

This is not to suggest that theatre can’t be magical or spontaneous, or that there isn’t room for improvisation in it. Theatre is an incredible artform, honing a particular set of muscles for performers. Being able to do the same thing, perfectly, almost every night for an extended period is a great skill to have. Being able to spontaneously react to the occasional problem that might occur in such an environment is another skill. However, the goal is consistency within the live framework.

In contrast, film is a more spontaneous medium. Because actors can film multiple takes, but only one take makes the final cut, actors have a freedom to explore and play. Brando very famously was so fond of making choices that he rarely delivered two matching takes. It was one of the reasons that Brando struggled in theatre. He got “bored and restless” with the repetition of theatre, ad libbing, improvising and missing cues during the Broadway run of A Streetcar Named Desire.

To pick an example, Johnson cannot look at an aside like “boat snack!” and figure out the best way to deliver that in the moment. He already knows how he delivered it in the audio booth a decade ago, how generations of children have heard that phrasing and pitch, how the audience turning up to see him expect it to be delivered. So he has to say that line the exact same way he did in the sound booth, ignoring the fact that he is no longer in the sound booth and his physicality is involved.  

This is not to compare Dwayne Johnson to Marlon Brando, but it does illustrate the problem with asking a performer to do something like this, to recreate an earlier performance placing an emphasis on repetition over innovation. After all, just like everything else in the movie, if the viewer wants a perfect version of Dwayne Johnson’s performance as Maui in the animated Moana film, that film is readily available to watch on Disney+. Johnson is playing a theme park mannequin of himself.

Johnson’s original take on “You’re Welcome” was an exhilarating demonstration of something that the audience didn’t know he was capable of. His encore of it just a decade later is nothing more than bad karaoke.