SNITCH (Rated PG-13)

Remember when Dwayne Johnson was “The Rock,” the buff action hero?  He’s not that guy in “Snitch,” though he turns in a rock solid performance as a desperate father trying to save his teenage son from a lengthy prison stretch.

Johnson’s John Matthews owns a construction company in Missouri, where his only connection to the criminal world is his willingness to hire ex-cons if they are sincere in their efforts for a clean start.

Divorced from his first wife (Melina Kanakaredes), Matthews, now remarried with a younger wife (Nadine Velazquez), has been regrettably somewhat distant from his teenage son Jason (Rafi Gavron).

In what appears to be a favor for a friend, Jason reluctantly accepts the shipment of a large package of ecstasy pills and is immediately caught by the feds and jailed for being a dealer.

To save his own skin, Jason’s so-called friend had allowed Jason to be framed for dealing drugs, thereby reducing his own sentence for participation in a crime.

Unable and unwilling to snitch on someone else, Jason is sentenced to prison for a minimum of 10 years, even though he’s an innocent who just screwed up.

The federal prosecutor, Joanne Keeghan (Susan Sarandon), is an ambitious, driven person who just happens to be running for Congress, thus all too anxious to notch a big drug-dealing conviction.

Matthews knows that his son has made a stupid mistake and doesn’t want him to stay behind bars where his personal safety is at stake as the result of beatings from fellow inmates.

In an attempt to get leniency for his son, Matthews pleads with U.S. Attorney Keeghan to help entrap real drug dealers as a way to make amends for his son’s indiscretion.

The federal prosecutor is, at first, dubious about this offer, sharing our own disbelief that a straight-arrow family man could leave his comfort zone to infiltrate the treacherous underworld of drug cartels.

With serious misgivings, Matthews finds that it might be useful to use one of his newest hard-working employees, a former felon who did prison time for selling narcotics, to introduce him to some dealers.

Ex-convict Daniel James (Jon Bernthal) has a wife and young son, and the last thing he wants to do is to get mixed up again with unsavory characters like Malik (Michael K. Williams), a local pusher.

Reluctantly pulled back into his old world, Daniel makes the introduction to Malik, and then Matthews is put to the test of making a delivery to members of a Mexican cartel and narrowly avoids harm during an ambush by a rival gang.

Having proved his mettle and savvy in eluding the surprise attack, Matthews attracts the attention of Malik’s superior, a top player in the Mexican cartel who is known as El Topo (Benjamin Bratt).

Meanwhile, Matthews and Daniel are shadowed by federal agents, of which the most notable and interesting character is Agent Cooper (Barry Pepper), who looks like one of the bikers on “Sons of Anarchy.”

While Agent Cooper’s undercover cop appears to be unpredictable, the motivated crime-busting prosecutor Keeghan is single-mindedly determined to go after the big fish in the Mexican cartel.

Keeghan’s motivation causes the stakes to grow exponentially, putting both Matthews and Daniel in the untenably tough spot of going up against a ruthless drug lord who would have no qualms about killing them both.

It would be a mistake to describe “Snitch” as an action picture full of violence and mayhem, similar to the spate of recent films where action trumped character development and significant plot lines.

The action in “Snitch” builds slowly, though the danger always feels very real and the threat of violence is only one misstep away from erupting into the fore.

Much of the story, at least in the early going, is about Matthews anguishing over moral compromises he has to make, whether it is keeping his wife in the dark or implicating Daniel in an unwanted and perilous bargain.  

The climactic drug run is where the explosive action really gets in gear in a huge, satisfying way.  Dwayne Johnson steering an 18-wheeler in a destructive demolition derby of taking out pursuing, machine-gun toting criminals is a real delight.

Indeed, Dwayne Johnson may have dropped “The Rock” as his middle name, but he’s still got the physical chops to deliver the action goods.

Balancing action and drama with aplomb, director and co-writer Ric Roman Waugh, a former stuntman, delivers an edge-of-your-seat thriller in “Snitch” that tells a compelling story.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.