The Rock takes over Arnie's turf with style

The latest messiah of the multiplex is Chris Vaughn, the character played by the former professional wrestler the Rock in Walking Tall, which opens today nationwide. Crisply directed by Kevin Bray, this film is a remake of the Nixon-era law-and-order hit of the same title, which was set in a Tennessee town taken over by vice peddlers, and starred Joe Don Baker as Sheriff Buford Pusser, a no-nonsense guy who cleaned up the streets with the help of a huge wooden club.

In the new film, the action has been transposed to Washington State (probably to allow the producers to shoot in the budget-friendly confines of British Columbia), and the Southern sheriff has become a Special Forces veteran who returns to find his hometown, once a cozy logging community nestled in a mountain valley, turned into a hellish den of iniquity.

Mothers abandon their squealing babies in their strollers while they duck into alleys to score methamphetamines; high school kids openly smoke marijuana; and the main street hardware store has been replaced by a Home Depot out by the highway. Mill workers, once dignified, are reduced to employment as bouncers in the town's only remaining business, the casino owned by Chris's childhood friend Jay Hamilton (a nicely menacing turn by Neal McDonough).

The big stick is back, too, and gets plenty of play once the fed-up townspeople elect Chris as their new, reform sheriff. Chris enlists his best buddy from high school (Johnny Knoxville), a reformed drug addict, to serve as his deputy, rescues his own childhood sweetheart (Kristen Wilson) from her career as a pole dancer at the casino and takes on his former friend's well-armed henchmen in what quickly becomes an apocalyptic battle of good versus evil.

With a brisk running time of 86 minutes, Walking Tall has no more fat on it than the Rock himself, a hulking yet curiously ingratiating presence who seems the most likely candidate to replace Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as America's favorite living comic book character. For all of his bulk, the Rock has a mildness of speech and a modesty of bearing that immediately give him a human dimension, something Schwarzenegger did not achieve until well into his career. Unlike so many of our recent action heroes, the Rock seems to be less about anger and revenge than about justice and self-discipline, a nuance that is also a saving grace.