Dwayne Johnson’s Movies, Ranked From Worst to Best

I count eight phases in his filmography, distinct even when they overlap. After The Middling Action Movies came The Middling Family Movies, also known as “The Skinny Era.” Around the same time, he launched The Comedy Side-Hustle, which rejuvenated him for The Successful Action Movies and The Ludicrously Successful Family Movies (which all somehow happened while he also made Ballers). But The Attempted DC Coup left him fleeing into the sequels and reboots of The Great Retrenchment. (We’re living there now; even Smashing Machine wants to remind you how cool it was watching him fight in the ‘90s.) But his worst era by far was The Streaming Age, when he churned out glossy clickbait junk for Amazon, Netflix and Disney+. Red One is the most offensive because it ruins Christmas, with Johnson giving one of his flattest stern-guy performances as St. Nick’s bodyguard.

The better Red movie only because nobody kicks a snowman in the crotch.

Released in theaters but conceived as Disney+ series, this pointless sequel gets buried here with the streaming slop for two reasons. First, there are no good songs. Second, the villain is a cloud.

If I’m Dwayne Johnson, I’m reading this list wondering how troll-ish this writer is for throwing four of my huge hits down here underneath The Tooth Fairy. I will discover, though, that the writer has a deep respect for me. He sees how all my creative endeavors are direct expressions of my experience and perspective. He may not like all my movies, but he recognizes there is only one single acting gig I truly didn’t care about. That would be this dull bit part as a cop in this straight-to-DVD heist flick, produced by scandal-plagued crudmeister Randall Emmett.

What led Johnson to Empire State, and the precipice of a Redbox career? The problems began when his initial action movies stalled, and he accelerated his personal Schwarzenegger career arc straight to Kindergarten Cop. It was the 2000s, so his family flicks trended crass and self-indulgent, like this tale of a selfish quarterback whose surprise daughter shows up eight years after — whoops! — he had break-up sex with his ex-wife.

Hockey goon grows wings. Another witless sports movie, but at least this one doesn’t require parents to explain what “unprotected sex” is.

An unwatchable greenscreen fantasy that turns momentarily adorable when Johnson grabs a ukulele to perform “What a Wonderful World” by a campfire.

Schwarzenegger had catchphrases. Johnson has nicknames, often hurled at his co-stars with throwaway aplomb. Sir Michael Caine becomes “Colonel Sanders” (he’s old!), Dame Julie Andrews is “Fairy Godmother” (she’s a fairy!), Emily Blunt is “Pants” (she’s wearing pants!), and Jason Statham has a “Harry Potter voice” (British!). But to understand everything wrong about this try-hard TV adaptation, check out every unfunny nickname Johnson’s veteran lifeguard bestows upon Zac Efron’s rookie: “One Direction,” “New Kids on the Block,” “NSYNC,” “Princess,” “Gold Medal,” “High School Musical, “Hot Wheels,” “Jonas Brother,” “Creepy Creeperton,” “Babygap,” “Troubled Youth,” “Malibu Ken,” “McDreamy,” “Bieber.”

Anthropologists believe we reached Peak Cameo in 2023, when every famous human was a toy in Barbie, a Spider-person in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or one of Carmy’s cousins on The Bear. That summer also brought the endless 10th Fast, which strings everyone in Diesel’s Rolodex together a long road to nowhere. Johnson’s own end-credits cameo is roughly four minutes shorter than the four-minute Instagram post he recorded to celebrate the cameo.

Other recipients of Johnson cameos include little-seen pop-music vanity projects, so-so comedies directed by his old co-workers and a gamer hit from fellow celebreneur Ryan Reynolds. Most essential is his climactic arrival in Tyler Perry’s manic Married sequel as the hot divorced philanthropist who asks Janet Jackson on a coffee date.

The only thing worth discussing in this generic talking-animal adventure is the end-credits scene, which features three Dwayne Johnson characters: Krypto, Black Adam and Black Adam’s dog, who tells Krypto why Black Adam is cool. It’s a perfect closed loop of publicity: Johnson hyping himself to himself. 

Lately, he tends to play either centuries-old sad sacks or con men keeping big secrets. This chintzy theme park adaptation splits the difference, because Johnson’s cheerful steamboat-driving con man is also a suicidal immortal. Which does not make sense, but that revelation produces an incredible Metallica-soundtracked flashback, where Johnson’s bearded cursed conquistador spends years sword fighting other cursed conquistadors before trapping them in a deep hole.

If you don’t mind sponcon, you’ll enjoy Florence Pugh as real-life wrestler Saraya “Paige” Bevis in this WWE production. Johnson appears as a corporate version of himself, though there’s an intriguing scene where he transforms into the Rock. Most people (and the man himself) tend to use his names interchangeably. But I think the Rock is best understood as a distinctive character, as different from Johnson as “The Rock Obama” was from our 44th president. The wrestler was brash and loud, a bit of Elvis impersonation plus preacher intonation and rap-battle affectation, blended together with fast-talking patter and enough preschool vulgarity (roody-poo?) to thrill the kids. His classic run as the Rock might still be Johnson’s greatest performance. Actually, I think his original wrestling career as the Rock is still Johnson’s greatest performance. But he hasn’t always embraced that persona in his movie work. Sometimes he tries hard to avoid it.

Case in point: As Chris Vaughn, the Special Forces vet saving his town from casino corruption, Johnson gives his first entirely charmless performance. You sense he was struggling with self-seriousness, desperate to prove he was more than a shirtless jerk. Damn it, though, that shirtless jerk was funny!

If you think it’s weird hearing Dwayne Johnson’s voice come out of a white astronaut who sort of looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger with Ryan Seacrest’s hair, remember that 2009 was a weird time when people used the word “post-racial” unironically.

Detention center employee Sean Porter starts a football team for his inmates, leaving no sports cliché untapped. Dying mom, teamwork, down at halftime in the final game: check, check, check.

Elmore Leonard’s 1999 novel features Elliot Wilhelm, a clever 6-foot-5-inch, 260-pound Black Polynesian bodyguard who does an “eyebrow thing.” Was the legendary writer a wrestling fan? The adaptation dumbs him down severely into a wide-eyed innocent, but Johnson still goes for the gusto. Singing Loretta Lynn, quoting Bring It On, flirtatiously slapping his blue-pantsed butt: A bit broad, but playing homosexual during the Bush administration was a bold move for a macho man.

Disney’s fourth best Witch Mountain movie, but Johnson’s performance as Vegas cabbie Jack Bruno deserves attention. It’s the first time he played a loser, with bills piling up in a cruddy motel room and NASCAR dreams fading into criminal convictions. Could the actor relate to Jack’s frustration? He was supposed to spend the 2000s taking the reins from Schwarzenegger’s whole Planet Hollywood action generation. Instead, Hollywood turned to fantasy franchises and superheroes, making action stars out of Tobey Maguire, Hugh Jackman, Orlando Bloom, Hayden Christensen, Christian Bale, Shia LaBeouf, the Harry Potter kids, the Narnia kids and Sam Worthington. You’d be frustrated, too, if you spent a whole decade watching the cute white boys get the plum blockbuster gigs.

Johnson plays gruff commander Sarge, a stolid military type tasked with saving a Martian lab from zombie demon aliens. And then Sarge goes mad, turning violent and fearful before the ancient mutant virus makes him the ultimate skin-ripped bad guy. Johnson’s rare performance of unhinged villainy makes this video game flop a legit curio.

Offscreen, Johnson started such a big feud with Vin Diesel it became a feud with Tyrese Gibson. Onscreen, Fate’s mostly a bummer: blackmail surprise baby, cruel main-character execution, unconvincing submarine. Johnson’s a rare bright spot in his most eccentric turn as Hobbs, leading a girls’ soccer team in the Haka, breaking out of prison by breaking everyone in the prison.

Future Wicked director Jon M. Chu pulled a clever bait-and-switch with this toybox sequel. The marketing materials brandished armor-plated Johnson as the gun-toting Roadblock. But Retaliation is way more interested with the moral redemption of Storm Shadow, the cool evil ninja played by Lee Byung-Hun and his ridonk abs.

To save his family from a Danish terrorist, one-legged security consultant Will Sawyer must climb the tallest building in the world — which is on fire! Worth seeing just for the apartment-wrecking fight with fellow tall person Pablo Schreiber. When his prosthetic leg gets pulled off, dear reader, Dwayne Johnson hops.

A big summer hit that’s aged poorly, unless you love Anne Hathaway plastic surgery jokes. But as the cool spy Steve Carell’s nerd spy admires, Johnson finds a new lane as a specific sort of character actor: the supporting alpha male who the lead beta male wants to be.

The last survivor of a dead tribe hunting the tyrant who murdered his family, Johnson’s first star turn is a direct copy of Schwarzenegger’s breakout role in 1982’s Conan the Barbarian. But where that movie luxuriated in hard-R grandiosity, the PG-13 King sanitizes its hero into a noble dud. Actually, as the hedonist chieftain who loves a good fight, the late Michael Clarke Duncan comes off more like the Rock than Johnson does.

See Jumanji: The Next Level.

The Jumanjis print money mixing B-grade Indiana Jones vibes with nonstop Deadpool-ish meta. They’re relentlessly OK. You know Johnson loves this series, though, because he spends an hour of the sequel committing to a (very good!) Danny DeVito impression.

Unless you count the heinous CGI man-scorpion, Johnson’s only in the prologue of this goofball sequel. A bit of a hoax when you consider how over-marketed his big screen debut was, but in fairness, that prologue is awesome. A world-conquering warrior winds up cursed to vengeful oblivion: It’s a complete epic journey, much wilder than any character arc Johnson has allowed himself since.

A grand theory about Dwayne Johnson: His supporting performances are better than his lead roles. Consider Rick “The Condor” Smith, a SWAT badass who pops up in this merry cop farce just long enough to blow himself up with his own grenade. A lot of his best parts are Condor expansions, letting him channel Rock-ish self-delusion to portray clowns who pump themselves up until they burst.

The best entry in his initial action run features Johnson as an underworld “retrieval expert” who hates guns and yearns to open his own restaurant. Schwarzenegger himself has a torch-passing cameo. Some Rockheads adore The Rundown for its throwback charms, though Johnson never quite seems like he’s in the same movie as chatterbox partner Seann William Scott.

Conversely, the best actor who ever got trapped on a frenemy mission with Johnson is Jon Bernthal, who plays the tense ex-druggie in this solid cartel thriller. Johnson is John Matthews, who … good lord — “John Matthews,” “Will Sawyer,” “Chris Vaughn,” “John Hartley” — do you think even Dwayne Johnson remembers any of these boring character names? Anyhow, in Snitch he’s a construction boss who becomes a DEA informant to reduce his son’s prison sentence, and Bernthal is his guide to the criminal underworld.

Another grand theory about Dwayne Johnson: He’s a boring straight man but an amazing comic force — a DeVito who happens to be shaped like a Schwarzenegger. Rawson Marshall Thurber’s espionage caper proves this point, casting typically motor-mouthed Kevin Hart as the baffled regular guy opposite Johnson’s misfit turned spy, who might be a dangerous fugitive and is definitely a total maniac.

Johnson is the rescue pilot who’s just about to sign his divorce papers when some tectonic megaquakes rip California apart. The one bad thing about this unabashed disaster porn is that it doesn’t get rereleased annually in 4DX.

You either believe Southland Tales is the epic bizarro statement of 21st century ruin, or you think all the dialogue sounds like a TED talk someone smoked through a gravity bong. Speaking as a respectful skeptic, the thing I do love in this surreal meander is Johnson as Boxer Santaros. (Now that’s a name!) As an amnesiac movie star cobwebbed within multiple conspiracies, Johnson exudes cocky swagger, hilarious cowardice and messianic assurance. He doesn’t usually spark chemistry with his female co-stars — he might be too respectful and wifeguy-ish for eroticism — but his dance with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Mandy Moore is genuinely sexy, and they’re dancing to freaking Moby.

A world-weary primatologist, who used to kill poachers for the United Nations, has to save his beloved giant gorilla from the government, an evil corporation, a giant wolf and a giant crocodile. A genuine kaiju hoot — and has Kid Cudi ever written a song for a Godzilla movie?

Conventional wisdom holds that the Fast series never recovered from the loss of Paul Walker. But the bigger problem starts here, when the car-heist crew joins Luke Hobbs to defeat evil car terrorists. Every previous Fast was about cool criminals working outside (or against) the straight world of law and order. From this sixth entry onwards, the onetime rebels become government-supported heroes, getting a bit more generic and Hobbs-ian with every entry. At least director Justin Lin sells out with style, ramping up the stakes with a tank battle and the world’s longest runway.

A superhero-loving skateboarder and his rebel archaeologist mom repel crime-syndicate colonizers from their fake Middle Eastern country with help from an ancient superhuman. Director Jaume Collet-Serra embraces pop-punk grandiosity, letting his black-clad antihero flay a whole army in one of most R-rated massacres to ever make a PG-13 movie. I like the Justice Society, and I like that the villain’s brilliant plan is to die and go to hell. Oddly, the one glaring problem is Johnson’s performance. It’s frustratingly unclear what Black Adam wants (and even more frustrating when he decides he wants to go back to sleep). I think Johnson got lost in the weeds of his megafranchise ambitions, never quite deciding if he was playing a conquering megalomaniac, a moral defender provoked to violence or a sad dad.

By my count, Johnson’s appeared in 49 narrative features. Add in this mesmerizing wrestling documentary for a nice round 50. Director Barry Blaustein doesn’t spend much time with Johnson (though of course his face is on the poster). But Mat’s a brilliant snapshot of the moment right before professional wrestling, and Johnson himself, evolved from niche interest to dominant fact of public life.

The only Brett Ratner film I’ll still admit to liking is this sneaky-smart 90-minute battlefest, which blends the Greco-steroidal thrills of a post-300 epic with the deconstructive playfulness of Steve Moore’s source-material comic. Johnson’s Hercules is a bit of a con artist, perpetuating his legend with significant help from his warrior entourage (which includes a hype man!). It’s an oddly confessional slab of beefcake, an argument that even the most legendary of heroes depended on stunt performers and hype men.

Honestly, it’s just nice to see him without all the greenscreen. Even buried under facial prosthetics, Johnson’s performance in this biopic feels stripped down and back-to-basics. As MMA pioneer and painkiller addict Mark Kerr, he shows you see the psycho-physical toll of a violent profession. Anyone who tracks down the original Smashing Machine documentary might be shocked to discover how much of Benny Safdie’s film is a scene-for-scene re-enactment. And I’m not sure this isn’t a vanity project (50-something Johnson plays 30-something Kerr). But I love Smashing Machine for luxuriating in certain hidden Dwayne Johnson qualities, pinpointing the finicky control-freakishness that drives athletes (and wrestler-actor-producer-entrepreneurs) to succeed past their physical limits.

The Rock had great wrestling one-liners, but only one movie has ever given Johnson a truly signature catchphrase. I’m talking “Daddy’s gotta go to work,” muttered by Luke Hobbs to his adorable daughter right before he flexes out of an arm cast. Rewrites and reshoots left him in a hospital bed for most of this zany-yet-heartfelt installment, but he makes a meal out of that big line.

Johnson gets released from prison, runs through the desert, finds a car in a junkyard, finds a gun in the car, drives to an office building and shoots a man through the forehead. That’s just the opening credits of this darkly funny revenge picture, which pits Johnson’s mysterious Driver against Billy Bob Thornton’s heroin-injecting detective and an insane yuppie hit man. It’s the kind of nasty bathroom-fight-in-a-strip-joint little movie Johnson made exactly once, but this hidden gem was also the moment he pinpointed his perfect 2010s look: shaved head, tight shirt over veiny arms, the precise sweaty-rage glare he was about to blast right into Dominic Toretto’s face.

A lunatic true-life crime comedy shot by Michael Bay with gaudy Miami pastels splattered blood red and neon dollar green. Mark Wahlberg plays the bodybuilder and frantic self-believer whose robbery plot veers inexorably toward kidnapping, torture and murder. As the born-again ex-con spiraling into cocaine madness, longtime Sunshine State resident Johnson seems to embody every stray notion of Florida manhood: muscles, religion, drugs, personal mottoes that sound like timeshare advertisements, Southern charm, conspicuous consumption. Credit Bay for giving Johnson his single best action scene, a bit of Grand Theft Auto urban carnage that starts with a robbery and ends with a missing toy.

In this action-comedy masterpiece, Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson are the most buddy cop of buddy cops, the kind of alpha detectives who ram cars through buses and allegedly date Kim Kardashian. They’re not around for very long; Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are the seemingly boring cops who will actually get important work done. But The Other Guys is a hysterical entertainment about the importance of procedural minutiae and white-collar prosecution, and part of its rollicking power is how completely Johnson symbolizes everything awesomely wrong about alpha-dog policing. He’s another Reno-ish supercop self-destructing from sheer awesomeness. It’s the apex of Johnson’s comedy career, and the one time any director got Johnson to fully embrace (and explode) the Rock persona in a movie.

One last grand theory about Dwayne Johnson: He’s a better villain than a hero. That’s why Luke Hobbs remains the greatest Fast & Furious bad guy, even though he’s only the antagonist for the first two-thirds of this hysterical and invigorating heist epic. Flown to Brazil to hunt down the renegade Toretto crew, he chases Dom across rooftops like an acrobatic buffalo. Johnson seems gloriously unfiltered, blending the braggadocio of his comedy roles with the bullet-headed intensity of Faster. Everyone else in Fast Five seems to be having a ball. Hobbs is the critical counterbalance, the human meteor who keeps crashing the party. One of the core concepts in professional wrestling is “putting over,” when one performer helps their opponent look awesome by losing badly in an epic showdown. With Fast Five, Johnson put Diesel over. He loses their big fight scene, then strikes a surprise alliance. “I’ll ride with you, Toretto”: That’s the sound of compromise, America! Fast Five put Johnson over, too. He got his biggest box office yet — and a long-overdue foothold in Hollywood’s blockbuster landscape.

Does it seem weird his greatest role is a sidekick in a cartoon? He has a famous face and a famous body, but Dwayne Johnson’s real art is in his permutations: the experiments in genre, slight but firm tweaks in persona, the childhood spent crisscrossing the country from Hawaii to Nashville to Pennsylvania, speaking at a Republican Convention, endorsing a Democratic candidate. Moana was another swerve, re-biting the Disney apple right as his action spectacles were finally hitting big. The bet paid off. Moana’s a true odyssey, stacked with excellent Lin-Manuel Miranda songs and visual gobsmack (The David Bowie mega-crab! The lava creature! The coconut pirates!).

Johnson-as-Maui could just be a bit of stuntcasting, all vain broad-shouldered pomposity. But there’s a quality of revelation in the demigod’s nature. Maui’s greatest strength is not, well, strength. He’s a shape-changer. He can fly through the air, swim through the sea, shrink like it’s 2006, grow like it’s 2010. He seems to cause as many problems as he solves, and the only cure for his Main Character Syndrome is to submit himself to the real hero’s journey. Maui never literally says, “I’ll ride with you, Moana,” but the ego-death message rhymes. Of course, sometimes the transformations go awry. He could become a shark with two legs, or he could do Tooth Fairy. But when you marvel at the breadth of his protean achievements — the fact that he is always completely himself, no matter how many selves he might be — really, what do you expect him to say, except, “You’re welcome”?