Young Rock Episode 1 Review: 4 Ups & 3 Downs

Downs...

3. Flat Acting From The Leads

There's no nice way of saying that an actor's performance is bad, and there's even less niceties available when three performances somehow manage to fall flat.

That's unfortunately the case with Young Rock, and it makes the show mildly cringe-worthy at times. Adrian Groulx plays the youngest incarnation of The Rock at ten years old, and gives the best performance out of the three leads. He has a cutesy charm that helps to ignore the awkward delivery.

Bradley Constant portrays The Rock at fifteen, and it's not a great performance. The delivery of his lines seems forced and unnatural, and jokes that should have landed turn into the show's worst attempts at comedy. Uli Latukefu is Rock at eighteen, and he gets the least material to work with, so he's thankfully more of a question mark than the other two leads. His lines weren't exactly zingers, so the writing could have been at fault and not the actor.

One reason the acting doesn't gel might be that the leads are never any more than a few scenes away from cutting back to the real Rock. Next to his charming delivery, it's a little boring seeing anyone else play him.

Hopefully it's just teething problems with the show, and not just because the actors were cast more for their likeness to The Rock than their acting capabilities.