Walking Tall (2004)

Walking Tall arrives in 2004 as a remake of a 1973 picture, which itself drew on the tenure of a Tennessee sheriff named Buford Pusser. Dwayne Johnson, then billed as The Rock, plays a Green Beret who comes home to find the cedar mill shuttered, a casino running the town, and his nephew in a hospital bed after a meth overdose. He takes a length of lumber to the security staff. The film is lean, loud, and entirely uninterested in subtext. It was not made to argue. It was made to hit things, and it hits them with a two-by-four, which critics at the time noted with some weariness.

The one thread worth pulling is the casting. Johnson inherits a role built from a white Southern lawman, and that substitution carries a certain weight on paper. On screen it carries none. The film never once acknowledges race, never lets the town's reaction to a Black sheriff complicate the plot, never gives the swap any meaning beyond the box office logic of putting a bankable star in a familiar shell. Female characters orbit the hero as stripper, sister, and mother, with the love interest quitting her job and handing him a weapon as her fullest expression of agency. There is no queer presence, no environmental conscience, no body politics, no neurodivergence. The picture is not hostile to any of it. It simply never occurs to the picture.

The villain owns a casino and runs drugs through it, which might look like a class critique until the hero's remedy turns out to be reopening a cedar mill. That is the political imagination on offer: a good small business replacing a bad big one. The courtroom speech is a civic rallying cry, not a sermon, and the film ends with the sheriff's star and a clean town. It is a blunt instrument, and it is honest about being one.