1.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for action violence and fleeting strong language
By Derrick Bang
First Pacific Rim: Uprising, and now this colossal dud.
If they represent the future of collaborative Sino-American filmmaking, we’re all in a lot of trouble.
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| At about this point, Will (Dwayne Johnson) and Sarah (Neve Campbell) must be asking themselves one question: How the hell can we escape this ridiculously stupid movie? |
Skyscraper is an inept, Frankenstein’s monster of a movie, noteworthy mostly for the way writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber shamelessly stole elements from far better sources: a little bit of Die Hard, a lot of Towering Inferno, a soupçon of Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, and a particularly ludicrous lift of the hall of mirrors sequence, from 1947’s Lady from Shanghai.
Frankly, I’m amazed Thurber had the gall to claim scripting credit, since there isn’t a single original note in this cacophonous, failed symphony of an action flick.
This is the apotheosis of lowest-common-denominator junk. Big budgets do not guarantee big pictures.
On top of which, Dwayne Johnson needs to select his starring roles much more carefully. Between this ludicrously silly atrocity and spring’s Rampage, he’s 0 for 2 … and believing yourself bullet-proof is the fastest path to destroying a once-golden career.
A brief prologue introduces Johnson as FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader and U.S. war veteran Will Sawyer, as he heads a mission that goes horribly awry. Flash-forward a decade, and we discover that Will lost a leg but gained a family, thanks to having met Naval surgeon Dr. Sarah Sawyer (Neve Campbell) in the aftermath of said catastrophe.
He now assesses skyscraper security protocols on behalf of insurance companies, having recently been hired to give final clearance to The Pearl, Hong Kong’s fresh bid at erecting the world’s tallest skyscraper. It’s a masterpiece of Jim Bissell’s laughably overstated production design: 3,500 feet and 225 stories tall, towering over the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbor, complete with a six-story shopping mall, a 30-story interior park, and more than 100 floors of luxury residential suites.
And a giant golf ball on top.
(Okay, it’s actually — and I’m quoting the press notes here — “an enormous luminous sphere … inspired by the ancient Chinese fable The Dragon Pearl.”)
Still looks like a giant golf ball, resting atop an overstated glass-and-steel tee.
The building is the brainchild of Chinese software developer Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han), a soft-spoken gazillionaire with a tendency toward fortune-cookie, wisdom-of-the-universe declarations regarding his immense “haven of tranquility.”
Will is so confident in Ji’s architectural masterpiece, that he has temporarily moved his entire family — Sarah and their two children, Georgia (McKenna Roberts) and Henry (Noah Cottrell) — into a 96th-floor suite.
What could possibly go wrong?
Enter terrorist Kores Botha (Roland Møller, sporting a perpetual sneer), who leads a team of gun-toting mercenaries into The Pearl that same evening, at which point they set fire to the 96th floor, intending the resulting wind turbine-driven updraft to scorch Ji out of his penthouse lair. The skyscraper’s fire-suppression safety features fail to engage because The Pearl’s off-site computer control center has been taken over by Botha’s adorably coifed femme fatale accomplice, Xia (Hannah Quinlivan). She really rocks that silly, hair-over-one-eye look.
Early on, Xia demonstrates her cold, killing-machine status by machine-gunning roughly three dozen computer techs and security guards. Definitely a nasty bee-yatch.
We can’t help wondering why Botha is going to all this trouble. We do eventually get an answer, which turns out to be the most contrived reason in the history of Hollywood screenwriting.
Words truly fail me.
But no matter. We’ve barely scratched the surface idiocy of Thurber’s numb-nuts script, which isn’t content to ignore basic laws of physics, deadly updrafts and human endurance, not to mention basic time and space. He goes whole-hog with baroque overacting and melodramatic contrivance, because — naturally — Will gets blamed for the control center massacre. Now hunted by the local law — in the form of token appearances by Hong Kong Inspector Wu (Byron Mann) and Sergeant Han (Elfina Luk) — our hero somehow must save his family, trapped inside what rapidly becomes a 225-story Roman candle.
His subsequent efforts of derring-do are captured on Smart phones wielded by the several hundred civilians and tourists watching from the ground below. Many of whom shudder, wince, ooo and ahhh at opportune moments.
In a better film, I’d call that ironic social commentary. In Thurber’s hands, it’s just another daft distraction, like he was insecure enough to insert his own cheering section.
It goes without saying that Johnson grimaces, groans, grunts and snarls his way through a mind-boggling series of impossible stunts (including one-upping Tom Cruise’s assault on Dubai’s Burj Khalifa). And I’ll grant points to the amusing and inventive ways that Will employs his artificial leg.
But it’s impossible to ignore the sheer lunacy of what takes place, starting when Will hand-over-hand climbs the exterior of a nearby 100-story crane in the space of roughly five or 10 minutes (in order to gain entry to the sealed-off skyscraper). And, once inside, it’s amazing how — despite the fact that Xia and her crew have “locked out” The Pearl’s computer system — Will nonetheless is able to access computer controls every time he opens another panel.
Continuity: not much.
It’s also blindingly obvious which supposedly “good” supporting characters turn out to be Very Bad People; they may as well sport Snidely Whiplash mustaches and wear signs that blink V-I-L-L-A-I-N.
Steve Jablonsky’s booming, throbbing guitar score is beyond obnoxious. I despair at the atonal, dissonant dreck that passes for movie “music” these days.
But the crowning moment of madness comes when Will is forced to dance with the massive, rapidly spinning wind turbines that help The Pearl achieve its negative carbon footprint … at which point, my 12-year-old companion nudged me and whispered, sotto voce, “This is just dumb.”
Mr. Thurber, if you can’t even please adolescent boys, you have well and truly failed.
So, what can be scraped from the wreckage of this film?
Campbell’s handling of Sarah is a pleasure: a resourceful woman capable of handling herself, both in terms of smarts and physical stuff. (She is ex-Navy, y’know.) Thurber isn’t bad at banter; the Johnson/Campbell dynamic is sweet, and there’s a good payoff to an early one-liner.
And, okay, yes; the film looks terrific. How can it not, with all the money that has been thrown — seemingly at random — on the screen?
But Skyscraper remains a mess: an inane, bloated, galumphing monstrosity that fails to engage on any level. Thurber needs to stick with the moron comedies for which he’s best known — Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, We’re the Millers and Central Intelligence — and leave real movie-making to the grown-ups.
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