TROUBLE agent
High school reunion.
“Initially, the idea was not Dwayne and Kevin at all,” explains director Rawson Marshall Thurber, telling Total Film how Central
Intelligence came to be. “The original joke was that Dwayne’s character was actually just a high-school loser who didn’t really change much. And he comes back to the reunion and you find out he works for the CIA. So the joke was sort of ‘fat Jason Bourne’. Imagine Chris Farley playing him: that was the joke. It was a good joke, but not the one that we went with.”
What Thurber opted for instead was the story of Bob, a bullied, overweight kid who transforms himself into a Dwayne Johnsonshaped CIA super-agent post-high school. In the meantime, Kevin Hart’s former ‘coolest kid in school’ has gone on to lead the thrill-free life of an accountant, until a chance meeting at the reunion suddenly makes him a key part in Bob’s latest mission.
When the artist formerly known as The Rock came on board, suddenly it all made sense. “When Dwayne expressed interest, a big, giant cartoon light bulb went off over the top of my head,” says Thurber. “I’m like, ‘Oh, of course. This makes perfect sense [ that] if someone was bullied in high-school, they would transform themselves into The Rock, into this literal superhero.’”
And when it came to casting the other piece of the buddy-movie puzzle, Hart fit the bill, although the action hero/funny guy dynamic isn’t going to play out quite as you might expect from seeing that pairing (of a ‘little Hart’ and a ‘big Johnson’, as the tagline superbly puts it) on paper. Impressed by Johnson’s comedy chops on Saturday Night Live, Thurber was disappointed that the former WWE wrestler doesn’t often get to show off that side of himself on the big screen. “One of the things I’m most proud of in this movie is that we took the biggest action star in the world and made him the funny guy,” says Thurber. “And we took one of the funniest people in the world and made him the straight man.” Although, the director is quick to point out that despite occupying the ‘straight’ role, Hart still gets laughs all throughout the movie (“I mean, he is literally a human joke machine.”)
A huge Beverly Hills Cop fan, Thurber, who’s better known for his comedies ( Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, We’re The Millers) is aiming to balance the laughs with the explosions. “This is not a comedy with a little bit of action, and it’s not an action movie with a little bit of [ laughter]… If you like action-comedy, this is that, right down the middle. If you’re on your Netflix queue and type in action comedy, this would be on the top of the list. I hope. Eventually!” With films not based on existing characters and ideas rarer and rarer in the crowded summer schedule, an untested property is always going to be a harder sell than a big comic-book dust-up. But, given its crowd-pleasing genre and Thurber, Johnson and Hart’s enviable box-office track records,
Central Intelligence might turn out to be one of summer’s smartest bets.