Review: Skyscraper (2018)

Skyscraper (2018)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of gun violence and action, and for brief strong language

Score: 3 out of 5

Skyscraper is a movie I can barely remember much about just a few days after I saw it, but what I can remember was pretty entertaining. It's the sort of "Die Hard on an X" movie -- a high-concept, star-driven action flick with a plot that can be summed up as "our hero is trapped in a building with bad guys for ninety minutes" -- that was Hollywood's bread-and-butter for action vehicles back in the '90s, but which fell by the wayside as blockbusters got ever bigger in the wake of Independence Day and The Matrix. In this case, it's "Die Hard on fire", combining that film with another action classic, the '70s disaster movie The Towering Inferno, by having Hans Gruber try to burn down Nakatomi Plaza on top of robbing it. Like any number of Dwayne Johnson's non-A-tier films like San Andreas and Rampage, it's dumb as hell, relying less on plot and more on special effects and its stars' charisma, and fortunately, it has those things in spades to keep it running from start to finish. Given why this type of movie generally doesn't get made much anymore, I'm not surprised that it kinda bombed at the box office, but even so, it's probably gonna find a long life on basic cable, streaming, and video on demand.

Dwayne Johnson is Will Sawyer, a former FBI Hostage Rescue Team specialist who, after losing his leg in a raid gone wrong, has become a security assessment specialist for high-rise buildings, having married the doctor Sarah (Neve Campbell) who helped him back on his prosthetic foot and had two kids with her, Georgia and Henry. Will has been hired by the Chinese industrialist Zhao Long Ji to do an assessment on his new building, the Pearl, a supertall skyscraper in Hong Kong that stands as the tallest building in the world. Unfortunately, Zhao was extorted for millions during the construction process by Kores Botha, an international criminal mastermind and terrorist-for-hire, and what's more, Zhao kept a detailed record of the payments he made to Botha in the hopes of using it to bring him down. When Botha finds out about this, he leads a team of mercenaries and gangsters to raid the Pearl, steal the memory card on which the records are stored, and burn the building to the ground, all while framing Will for it after stealing his login access to the building's security systems. Now Will, who was inspecting an offsite facility when this started, must find his way back into a burning building and save his family, who are trapped in the apartments above the point where Botha started the fire.

The plot I laid out there is pretty insubstantial, about as important as the storylines to 90% of big-budget video games. What this film is really about is improbable escapes, tons of special effects, Johnson beating the shit out of goons, and exploiting the audience's fear of heights to the fullest. Yep, this is a capital-B blockbuster in the most classical, stereotypical sense, a movie that's all about the sheer scale of its spectacle and the charm of its cast at the expense of everything else. For instance, the Pearl has a forty-story vertical park and a pair of wind turbines to generate its own power, there solely so we can have scenes where Neve Campbell and the kids have to escape what looks more like a wildfire than a building fire, or Dwayne Johnson has to jump between the turbines' blades in order to do what he has to do. When we're shown the high-tech funhouse mirror room on the top floor, the film is practically screaming in our faces that this is where the final boss fight between the hero and the villain is going to take place. And I loved it. There was no pretense here, just outrageous scenarios for our protagonists to overcome, and it didn't care how many leaps in logic it had to make in order to set them up; it just did. This film's complete and utter commitment to its mindlessness, without trying to overthink any of this, was actually refreshing in a world of franchises that obsess over continuity. It may not make for great moviemaking, and some might dispute that it even makes for the good kind, but it sure makes for the entertaining kind.

You'll notice that, outside the plot description, I haven't referred to Johnson or Campbell by their characters' names, and that's because such things aren't important. Johnson once again demonstrates why he's one of the biggest movie stars on the planet as he fights his way up a burning building through bad guys and fire hazards. It's practically pointless to really describe a Johnson performance, seeing as how he's basically the modern-day equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a guy who could easily let his physique do all the talking but also manages to bring with him a self-awareness and charisma that sets him apart from many lower-tier action stars. His character isn't much of a twist on what you expect when you hear "Dwayne Johnson character" (he has a prosthetic leg, but it's only really treated as just one more thing for him to work around), but he has it down to a science at this point. Campbell also gets a lot more to do than what I expected given the character description, both getting some fight scenes where she protects her kids and managing to do some work on the ground with the hyper-competent Chinese cops (it goes without saying that the filmmakers were hoping for big money in the Chinese market) after she manages to get out of the building (Johnson had to stay behind, because contrivances). The villains, on the other hand, are mostly forgettable. Save for the Taiwanese-Australian actress Hannah Quinlivan as the token henchwoman of the bunch (and the only one who gets much real focus), the bad guys are a bunch of one-dimensional, Euro-accented mooks who exist for Johnson to put into chokeholds. Botha himself is a similarly flat figure, one who only gave off menace because he was literally about to drop a little girl thousands of feet to her death. Likewise, while the visual effects for the scenes of the fire slowly destroying the building are impressive, the smaller-scale fights and shootouts are rather poorly shot and do a great disservice to Johnson's talents in that department. Why they needed so many quick cuts when they had a former professional fighter as their star, I have no idea.

The Bottom Line

A simple movie, with a simple plot, that provides simple but well-done thrills. There's nothing to it that you can't already glean from the poster, but it's still does a great job of what it sets out to do, thanks to a pair of talented leads, great special effects, and a knowing, winking certainty about the kind of movie it is.