You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Ballers.
The Rock.
HBO.
It’s a show about a retired NFL defensive end who is working with football players to keep them on the straight and narrow.
The Rock has post concussion syndrome and pain pill addiction.
He is a flawed character, but a powerful force on the screen.
And that’s a key dynamic of Ballers.
The Rock is really a surprising actor.
He is a big ass mother F***er. He is a tattooed brick shit house. He is a bald wrecking crew.
He is an action hero that can shoot a gun and bust a skull, but when the scene calms down and the music fades out, the Rock can deliver a line with passion and conviction.
The Boz? Nice rainbow mowhawk, but he couldn’t act
Michael Jordan? Bugs Bunny had a better chance of winning an oscar in Space Jam.
Jim Brown? an NFL great, a bad ass 60’s militant? You bet.
But an actor?
Not unless he was playing a recalcitrant stone faced bastard.
But the Rock? Well this son of a bitch can act.
He’s quick and believable and funny.
If Marlon Brando could bench press 400 pounds, he might just be the Rock.
If Al Pacino could fire a 50 caliber with one arm smoking a cigar? Then he might just be the Rock.
The Rock is Arnold Schwarzenegger with less accent. He is Arnold without banging the maid.
I don’t even know what that means?
Ballers isn’t just the Rock. It’s an ensemble cast of gang banging NFL hoodlums. It’s a myriad of Miami power brokers trying to pimp the athletes for their millions before they make it rain one too many times.
The Rock spends half the show in a wife beater exposing his Polynesian body ink. He spends the other half of the show squeezing into an Italian dress shirt and fine silk suit.
He then drops a few dozen F bombs while counseling NFL morons on how not to lose their millions.
The dumb jocks are driving lambroghinnis, living large and dating multiple women at a time.
It’s a vomitorium of wasted money pump pump pumpin to a gangsta beat.
The GPS is set in South Florida, so decadence and aqua blue scenery is just a back drop for more frivolous debauchery.
The level of unsavory is edgy.
Snorting cocaine off a stripper’s chest. That’s the base line for Ballers.
Smoking a blunt in a yacht in a hot tub full of strippers?
That’s just the opening 5 minutes.
The story lines are all about Jock dumb being dumb, living for the now and not tomorrow.
The Rock’s job is to steer them clear of the rocks.
His advice is real, and their ability to understand like listening to the Pope in Polish.
The conflict is never-ending. It’s the 7 year itch with a marital discourse being broadcast through a megaphone.
The athletes are unpredictable and random like those Chinese fire crackers that spin in a circle at a thousand miles an hour.
At the end of the day
As one of the wayward Ballers says having just inhaled a huge bong hit; “they have people in there smoking weed all day and there’s this nasty freak room and there are girls playing with themselves. Momma. Please let me come home.”
Ha ha ha.
HBO has taken Nasty to a new level.
Ballers.
Life’s Crazy™