Skyscraper: Up in smoke

Skyscraper (2018) • View trailer 
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.

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.

Edge of Tomorrow: Sharp sci-fi thrills

Edge of Tomorrow (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for intense sci-fi action and violence, profanity and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.6.14

Think Groundhog Day on steroids.

This is slick and suspenseful action sci-fi, fueled by an intriguing premise and pulse-pounding momentum courtesy of director Doug Liman and editor James Herbert. Veteran scripter Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, Jack Reacher) and colleagues Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth clearly have shaped their narrative to fit star Tom Cruise’s outsized presence, but not in the way that one might expect (at least, not until the final act).

As Cage (Tom Cruise, center) listens, his confusion mounting, Carter (Noah Taylor) and
Vrataski (Emily Blunt) explain that the thousands upon thousands of ferocious "Mimic"
warriors should be regarded as mere appendages of a single controlling hive-mind. Well
and good, but where does that leave our outnumbered and overwhelmed Earth forces?

Like many action stars before him, Cruise has been “handling” his advancing age — 52 and counting — by ignoring it completely. In fairness, he has done a pretty good job of that, relying on muscular feats such as scrambling up the side of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, with the élan of a stuntman half his age.

Cruise also has a couple of signature stunts that apparently get written into all of his scripts: You can always count on at least one scene where an explosion savagely hurls him from one end of the screen to the other; and another scene that involves surviving a lengthy fall and a bone-crunching thump as he lands on his back, his pain-contorted features conveniently facing the camera.

You’ll find both stunts in this film, as well.

But I come not to bury Cruise, but to praise him; the march of time notwithstanding, he makes such brawny hokum work. More to the point, Edge of Tomorrow plays against Cruise’s usual role as the smartest and most capable person in the room, in this case making the signature ear-splitting grin and Mr. Slick aura work against the character in question. That’s both unexpected and clever, not to mention rather savvy on Cruise’s part; it makes both him and the film that much more interesting.

Edge of Tomorrow started life as All You Need Is Kill, a 2004 sci-fi novel by Japanese author Hiroshi Sakurazaka and illustrator Yoshitoshi ABe. The futuristic setting finds Earth under siege by an invading alien armada of ferocious biomechanical “Mimics” that seem able to overcome anything we can throw at them (and, rather unfortunately for this big-screen adaptation, bear a striking resemblance to the nastier Decepticons in the Transformers movie franchise).

Sakurazaka’s protagonist is a ground-level grunt in the United Defense Force. Taking an entirely different approach, Cruise stars as Maj. William Cage, a smooth-talking military glad-hander who has called upon his previous experience as an advertising exec, to orchestrate the gung-ho PR campaign that has made so many young men and women eager to don battle armor and die for the global cause.

Cage has been careful, however, to ensure that dying is something for other people; he wants nothing to do with the front-line assault that has been mounted against the otherworldly invaders that have captured all of Western Europe. Unfortunately, Cage unwisely irritates a four-star general — Brendan Gleeson, perfectly cast as the dour Brigham — who has no patience for smug “bystanders.”