“Walking Tall,” a skull-pounding vigilante action flick based on the 1973 “hicksploitation” classic, is more or less pickled in testosterone, with all the attendant symptoms. It’s crude, violent, mentally undernourished and — God help me — kind of amusing.

One-time pro wrestling paragon Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (“The Scorpion King”) plays Chris Vaughn, a violence-haunted U.S. Army Special Forces operative who returns to his hometown in rural Washington to find the lumber mill shut down, the streets clogged with crystal meth and a former classmate, Jay Hamilton Jr. (Neal McDonough from “Minority Report”), calling the shots at a tacky cathouse/
casino hybrid on the outskirts of the city. It’s a dirty, corrupt town — even the sheriff (Michael Bowen) is in Hamilton’s pocket — and “it won’t stand,” to use Vaughn’s favorite glib catchphrase.

The only recognizable similarity between this “Walking Tall” and the original — which starred beefy cracker Joe Don Baker as real-life Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser — is the hero’s penchant for a nice 2-by-4 inch piece of cedar which he adopts as his weapon of choice when his little brother (Khleo Thomas from “Holes”) gets sick from some drugs he picked up at the casino. Admittedly, The Rock swings a nice stick and every time he whacks some oily minion across the noggin, director Kevin Bray (“All About the Benjamins”) lustily rattles the camera as if we, too, were absorbing The Rock’s anabolic indignation. Fun, fun.

MTV prankster Johnny Knoxville plays Vaughn’s high school pal and sidekick, Ray, and his performance as a scrappy recovering junkie isn’t half-bad — like Tom Arnold in “True Lies,” he makes a nice foil to the mountain of muscle with the more limited acting range. On a side note, the soundtrack features alt-rock elf Francii doing a cover of an old New Order song, which is funny, since “Walking Tall” is more of a Toby Keith sort of movie, one would think.

Bray and his screenwriters (there are four of them, but it’s anybody’s guess where all the literary brainpower went) refuse to let little things like recognizable human behavior get in the way of the hormonal good times. Due to some fantastic twist of fate, Vaughn is elected sheriff in the only town in America where exchanges of machine gun fire draw the interest of neither the media or federal law enforcement.

As a vigilante hero, it also helps to have a nemesis as guileless as Hamilton, who helpfully leaves his drug labs unguarded and does everything he can to accelerate his own demise. Suffice to say, if real-life gangsters had survival mechanisms as underdeveloped as those in “Walking Tall,” crime as we know it would vanish overnight.