4/17/17 Central Intelligence? (Movie)

    Being forced to stay in the house, we watched a movie off the HBO On Demand function on our cable box,  It is surprising to see so many movies available actually, but the first one to jump at me was Central Intelligence, a movie that came out late last year with Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart.  The premise was kind of silly, Dwayne was a fat kid in high school and Hart was the stud athlete.  Twenty years later, Dwayne is sporting all sorts of muscles and a chiseled body, and Hart's character has sort of plateaued and kind of given up as a mid-level accountant.
    Dwayne reintroduces himself to Kevin just as Kevin is deciding whether to attend their twenty year reunion.  Dwayne plays it up like he is still kind of a dork, but in reality he has joined the CIA and is a James Bond type of person capable of evading capture.  They meet up at a bar, mostly so Kevin's character can avoid going to a relationship counselor which his wife is pushing for.  At the bar, Kevin starts noticing how bad-ass Dwayne's character has become as he beats up a group of surly troublemakers.
    In the next scene they are at Kevin's house and Dwayne gives him codes to some secret accounts which activates the CIA and they show up the following morning on the hunt for Dwayne who they claim has gone rogue and killed his partner.  At this point the movie starts going fast and either Kevin believes his high school classmate is a good guy  who needs to clear his name or the CIA is right and Dwayne is a cold hearted killer.
    They keep getting into funny situations, such as when Dwayne acts like the therapist between his wife and Kevin.  He comes up with exercises which of course the wife is eating up but are just silly, from our perspective.
    His partner who had been presumed dead early in the movie, and probably killed by Dwayne is actually the bad guy.  He faked his own death in the elevator, and the blame fell on Dwayne.  Dwayne still has a personal foible where he freezes whenever he is pushed too far, stemming from when he was in high school and was embarrassed by an unlikely bully, a young Jason Bateman.  They go and meet up with him to use his services as a higher level accountant.  He seems to be helping them, and even starts apologizing like he has found god, only to turn and make fun of Dwayne one more time, as we watch him freeze once again.
    It has been fun watching the Rock/Dwayne Johnson become our big muscle bound hero.  He is this generation's Arnold Schwarzennegger, and that is good because us Americans love our super sized heroes.  There was a time at the end of the 80s and 90s when it was worrisome as we could see the few hero types getting older, like Arnold, Rambo, Lou Ferrigno.  They are still around and have even made movies making fun of themselves, like The Expendables.
    In the end of the movie, Dwayne's message was simply, be yourself.  They end up at their reunion and instead of fearing the gym where he was embarrassed twenty years ago, he owned the situation and stripped down to his birthday suit and danced the night away.