Today, he stars in blockbuster action comedies and plays one of the most beloved characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Drax the Destroyer. But few will remember that WWE star Dave Bautista's first big acting break outside the wrestling ring came in a long-forgotten straight-to-DVD movie that he didn't even star in -- and that was so bad, he signed up for acting lessons after finally seeing the finished version of the film.
Bautista's first major acting role -- if "major" is the right term to use -- came in the 2010 straight-to-video production Wrong Side of Town, which technically starred fellow WWE alum Rob Van Dam. For Van Dam, who had been out of WWE for a few years at that point, it was his first lead acting role, and his first film since appearing in the similarly straight-to-video Black Mask 2: City of Masks in 2002 opposite future Jigsaw actor Tobin Bell. Despite featuring prominently on the poster, Bautista only shows up for a few scenes in Wrong Side of Town, but it was his first large film role in an acting career that up until that point had mostly consisted of a one-off appearance on an episode of Smallville.
The film is B movie to its core, with Van Dam starring as Bobby Kalinowski, a mild-mannered ex-Navy Seal-turned-landscape architect, who simply wants to enjoy a quiet life with his wife and teen daughter. Unlike the hard-partying Van Dam, Kalinowski has to be dragged out against his will for a night on the town by his new neighbors, where he runs into trouble trying to protect his wife from being assaulted by the drugged-up ne'er do well son of the club's owner, Seth Bordas. The son is killed in the struggle when he falls on his own knife, and Bordas -- who also just so happens to be a local crime lord -- puts a bounty on Kalinowski's head before kidnapping his daughter. With the local police in Bordas' pocket, Kalinowski must use his Navy Seal training to dodge the criminals and corrupt cops looking to take him down, as well as a knife-wielding assassin played by rapper Ja Rule, before rescuing his daughter.
Bautista plays Big Ronnie, a.k.a. B.R., a former Navy Seal associate-turned-strip-club-owner who Kalinowski turns to for help. He only appears in a handful of scenes late in the movie, but his appearances are certainly memorable. In his first scene, Kalinowski visits him in his strip club, where Bautista spends the entire scene seated next to a silent -- and topless -- Stormy Daniels, best known now as a porn star and future presidential mistress. Bautista's character declines to help Van Dam's character, but then shows up unexpectedly to provide back-up in the climactic fight scene anyways.
In the cinematic battle that the world didn't know that it needed, Bautista squares up against Ja Rule's character to give Van Dam time to take on the lead villain. The bout between Bautista and Ja Rule is about as absurd as one might expect, and involves Ja Rule whipping off his shirt, getting bodyslammed and ground-and-pounded by Bautista, the two engaging each other in an elaborate knife fight, and, at one point, appearing to slap at each other's hands like frightened middle schoolers thanks to some confusing sound foley work.
The match ends in a draw, as Ja Rule makes his escape to menace Rob Van Dam a little more. Bautista shows up just in time to seemingly save Van Dam, quickly announce that he's leaving Van Dam to a crowd of criminal bounty hunters, then just as quickly swerve back into hero mode to gun down Ja Rule and save the day. The movie closes with Van Dam and Bautista trading quips about friendship before Van Dam reunites with his family and Bautista walks off into the proverbial sunset.
While the movie exists now mostly as the answer to the trivia question "What was Dave Bautista's first significant film role," its greatest legacy might be in how it affected Bautista on a personal level. The WWE star later stated that he was so embarrassed after seeing his performance in Wrong Side of Town that it motivated him to hire an acting coach to try to improve his performances in the future. The course of history is often determined in the most unexpected ways -- and for Dave Bautista, it appears that there could be no Drax the Destroyer without Rob Van Dam, Ja Rule, and the terrible glory of a little-seen straight-to-video movie called Wrong Side of Town.