Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart (Claire Folger/Warner Bros. Pictures)

The late John Hughes specialized in coming of age movies that went against the grain of sexploitation comedies and treated teens not as pieces of unformed meat but as human beings. “People forget that when you’re 16, you’re probably more serious than you’ll ever be again,” he said. At a glance, Central Intelligence, a buddy action movie vehicle for Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, seems little more than light summer entertainment. But the specter of Hughes is all over this entertaining, clever, and finally heartwarming comedy.

The movie opens with high school horror circa 1996. Nerdy, overweight Robbie Weirdicht (a grotesquely CGI-ed Johnson) is in the gym shower before an assembly at Central High School in Baltimore. He’s dancing naked—as the saying goes, like nobody’s watching. But somebody is watching, a group of school bullies who grab the grooving outcast and throw him naked out onto the basketball court, in front of a school gathered to honor Calvin Joyner (a mildly CGI-ed Hart) as the student most likely to succeed. The whole school laughs at the naked freak—that is, except for Calvin, who hands Robbie his letter jacket to cover himself up.

What you see of that scene in the movie’s trailer paints it as low comedy, but such moments of heart raise the film’s characters and message above the comedic norm of cartoon stereotypes.

Twenty years later, Calvin is married to his high-school sweetheart (Danielle Nicolet) and is a mid-level forensic accountant at the kind of building that has an inflatable gorilla in front. His high school reunion is tomorrow night, but he feels that he’s never fulfilled the promise he showed 20 years ago, and doesn’t want to go. He unexpectedly hears from Robbie, now calling himself Bob Stone, and that nerdy dancing kid has grown up to be, well, The Rock, a strong guy who has an incongruous love for unicorns and Sixteen Candles, his favorite movie of all time. (When he asks Calvin if he’s seen the movie, his simple answer is, “I’m black.”)

Calvin is reluctantly drawn into a world of intrigue with Bob, a CIA agent who may or may not have gone rogue, and the film’s buddy tropes are tempered by Calvin’s uncertainty about his old classmate—is he a good guy or a bad guy?

Director Rawson Marshall Thurber (Easy A) keeps the jokes and action coming, but also keeps his lead characters human, especially Johnson. The prolific actors spends most of his time in action roles that don’t give him much room to create, but his Robbie is an endearing and sensitive goofball.

The movie unfolds as you might expect, but there are unpredictable touches I won’t spoil (suffice to say that the office building mascot follows the dramatic principle of Chekhov’s Gorilla). Central Intelligence has plenty of thrills and laughs, but the real central intelligence is believing in yourself.

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Central Intelligence
Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber
Written by Ike Barinholtz, David Stassen, and Rawson Marshall Thurber
With Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Danielle Nicolet, Amy Ryan
Rated PG-13 for crude and suggestive humor, some nudity, action violence and brief strong language
114 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you