Skyscraper

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell, Chin Hen, Roland Miller, Noah Taylor, Byron Mann, Pablo Schreiber, Mckenna Roberts, Noah Cottrell
Directed by: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Action, Thriller
2018

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: A security expert (Dwayne Johnson) must enter a burning skyscraper to save his family and overcome the criminals who purposely want it to burn down.

Review:

Tim: It's one of the craziest facts (or my opinion) that Dwayne Johnson has never made a great movie. I like him a lot and I look forward to his films, but this is the 28th film of his I've seen and zero have been great. Although he's always enjoyable in his movies, he's made a bunch of bad films. I wouldn't go so far as to call Skyscraper bad. It's a decent film and certainly an improvement over the other 2018 Johnson film, Rampage. This movie is at least mildly entertaining and has a few decent sequences. However, you can't help but feel like Johnson deserves a better movie than this.

This film is basically a remake of The Towering Inferno, although I appreciated it ventured out as an "original" movie. It owes a lot to that earlier film. Johnson is a security expert who has knowledge of the newly opened largest building in the world. There's some criminals who want to burn the building now to obtain something inside the building. Johnson's family is trapped inside and he must enter the burning skyscraper to rescue them. One of the biggest problems I had with the film is that the whole plot about the criminals, what they're after- it all felt anticlimactic, generic, and forgettable. I'm honestly scratching my head a bit now trying to remember the details and why any of it mattered. It all felt like just an excuse to get Johnson inside the building. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber also wrote the script, so this is completely on him. The story truly isn't very compelling at all. Johnson doing heroic things in a skyscraper was fun, but the plot felt far too generic.

The best scenes all involve Johnson either trying to get into the skyscraper, or moving through or on the outside of the building. This kind of makes sense- you put your protagonist in a giant burning building and that's going to be fairly entertaining. The highlight is probably the scene where Johnson is leaping from a nearby crane into the building. The scene defies logic and it requires a massive suspension of disbelief, but it's a pretty cool scene. There's another good one with Johnson scaling the outside of the building. It's exciting and intense. Again, it's illogical and hard to take seriously (the duct tape hands weren't doing it for me) but it was fun to watch in a guilty pleasure kind of way. While these are the best scenes in the film, it's hard not to see that they could have been so much better. The film gave us a number of scenes of the crowds and media outside the skyscraper watching Johnson's progress. I normally love these scenes- there's something so exhilarating about watching people react emotionally to someone doing an amazing thing. Sequences like that are often my favorite in movies, yet they felt surprisingly low impact here. I often get chills watching those scenes, but it didn't happen here.

Johnson is good in the lead role. I didn't quite buy him as a security expert, but he's such a physical actor that it's genuinely fun seeing him in these kinds of roles. I thought giving his character a prosthetic leg was interesting. It certainly added some vulnerability to his character. On the other hand, it made some of his stunts feel a bit too unrealistic. Still, Johnson was entertaining. I liked seeing Neve Campbell here. She doesn't appear in movies nearly enough. She worked well opposite Johnson and actually gets a few things to do. I loved seeing Pablo Schreiber here, but I wish he role was bigger. Chin Han was good. The villains are all pretty bland, though. The movie needed a more memorable, compelling antagonist.

Skyscraper was certainly a decent movie. There's a few fun sequences in the movie. It does make us roll our eyes a bit too much, but it's better than some of Johnson's movies in recent years. I do desperately wish the film was better, but I guess decent is what we got.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating- 6.5



If You Enjoyed This Movie, We Recommend: San Andreas, Rampage