Johnson's charisma can't save faulty Skyscraper

Dwayne Johnson in Skyscraper. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Being a Dwayne Johnson fan can be a painful experience. For every Moana and his regular appearances in the Fast and the Furious franchise, there’s something dreadful waiting. Walking Tall, San Andreas, Be Cool. Nary a one of those films is good, but they are at least mildly entertaining because of the well-documented charm of Dwayne Johnson, the only actor who regularly turns awful into mildly entertaining. It's as if he's on a quest to take roles in as many half-baked or completely asinine films as he can and see just how far audiences will follow him. His journey through the cinematic minefield has taken him to Skyscraper, yet another movie best described by the phrase “the Rock makes it watchable.” 

 

Skyscraper isn't the worst material Johnson has ever taken on. He stars as former FBI agent Will Sawyer, who gets wrapped up in a terrorist plot involving the billionaire owner Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han) of the largest, most technologically marvelous building in the world. Ji is the target of a terrorist attack coordinated by Kores Botha (Roland Møller), and Will's wife (Neve Campbell) and children (McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell) are stuck in the middle of everything. Naturally, it becomes Will's job to stop the terrorists and save his family from the danger he accidentally got them into. Nothing in the aforementioned premise is overly exciting or new; this is a Die Hard rehash, transplanted from Los Angeles to Hong Kong and exchanging German terrorists for more diverse terrorists to soak in some of that sweet, sweet, foreign box office cash. Despite the tired concept, the premise has enough room for writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber to navigate a fun, nifty little action flick. 

 

The opening scene hints that Thurber has something more in mind for Skyscraper. It's a clever set up, starting with the peaceful snowfall and showing a small house in the middle of the woods before panning back to reveal a dangerous situation. Thurber does an excellent job showing the danger of the situation, emphasizing that things are not quite as they seem. It's an ambitious opening scene that results in a captivating opening sequence that, in a good movie, would link directly to the events of the rest of the film. Instead, it appears Thurber used up his best ideas for Skyscraper in the first five minutes. The nuanced storytelling shown in the opening is tossed in the very next scene, thanks to a torrent of exposition. Even the themes that could be carried from the opening are largely abandoned, revisited visually during the inevitable showdown between Will and Kores but not thematically or emotionally. An opening as good as this movie has should infect the rest of the film to provide some connection to the experience for the character, who undergoes a massive amount of emotional trauma that isn't revisited. 

 

Like the eponymous building, Skyscraper becomes big for the sake of being big, sacrificing storytelling and aesthetics so it can resemble a summer blockbuster. A boring, often incompetent blockbuster to boot. A lot of it is tied to some poor filmmaking choices from Thurber, for example his decision to explore the area outside the building instead of staying inside. What's lost is the paradoxical claustrophobia the setting should invoke, as a place as large as the eponymous building should both welcome and trap its occupants. Once Thurber ventures outside the mystique is lost, and the building is never utilized as an inescapable setting.

Skyscraper is influenced heavily by Die Hard and old school disaster movies, although the combination of the two in this movie is shockingly dull. The action scenes, often stolen from better films like Enter the Dragon are clichéd and unimaginative. An overarching sense of fun is lost because the movie plays it very straight, limiting the hints of tackiness that make the disaster movies sort of fun to watch. Even Johnson is restrained, limited in the number of little winks he gives to the audience to remind them he’s here to ensure they have a good time. The filmmaking isn't strong enough to maintain a serious tone, and a less rambunctious Dwayne Johnson is simply a waste of a movie star and his magnificent talent.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 102 minutes

Genre: Action

tl;dr

What Worked: Dwayne Johnson, the opening scene

What Sucked: The rest of the story, the dialog, the special effects

Watch Instead: Die Hard, The Poseidon Adventure, Southland Tales