*Originally written July 17th, 2018*
I'll admit, I never went into Skyscraper with any kind of expectations. The trailers did nothing for me, it just looked like a CGI heavy Die Hard clone with Dwayne Johnson. Which is exactly what it was, but it never managed to be fun or entertaining. I just felt bored and depressingly insulted by every moment of this complete farce.
Dwayne Johnson plays a security expert/a mixture of ex special forces and police cliches. Seriously, they couldn't settle on one, so he's a bunch of different things I do not care enough about to check or remember. He's hired to run security on the tallest skyscraper in the world, a high-tech, mile high palace still under construction. Terrorists get involved and he has to save his family who are trapped inside the building.
It's as lazy and cliched as it sounds, it wants to be Dwayne Johnson's Die Hard so bad, but never once has the wit, fun or creativity to hold a candle to the action classic. I was just so disinterested by everything unfolding onscreen. You can predict where everything goes and how it wraps up within the first ten minutes. There are no surprises or subverting expectations, you know everything you're getting from the trailer.
Which can be fine, some action films of recent years don't need to do anything special to be fun, Gerard Butler has built a career on this. It's just a shame Skyscraper constantly takes the lazy route every chance it gets. Everything is telegraphed from the get go, you can tell who is going to turn bad later in the film based on their accents. There are so many seeds set early on that have such cringe worthy payoffs at the end that I just put my hands on my head and groaned. It was painful.
Even as an action film, Skyscraper has no creativity for it's set-pieces, it's stupidly over the top and knows it, but feels like a mess of poor CGI and bland direction (I really expect better from the director of Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story), no action scenes had any sort of tension or fluidity to them. Despite the huge CGI explosions happening around the characters, it all just felt hollow and depressing.
The most interesting thing here was the inclusion of Dwayne Johnson's characters having one leg, but that only really comes into play at one moment and serves no purpose, although I do like the idea of a disabled action hero. It was just strange to have a character with one leg, but is constantly impervious to injury at any point during the film after the opening. If they were trying to make a Die Hard homage, they could have had the hero actually feeling what was happening to him.
Johnson himself is fine as he usually is. He's impossible to hate, but I'm getting a little tired of his act now. He is so watchable, it's just a shame he wastes himself in such boring, action films. It feels as if he takes any role he is offered, despite the quality. Almost like the Nicolas Cage of big budget films.
There's so little else to say about Skyscraper. It fails on pretty much every level. A boring, cliche mess of a film that lacks any kind of impact, fun or thrills. With the almost as boring Rampage and now this, Johnson is really not having a good year for films. Cinema is dead.
3/10 Dans
Skyscraper is out now in cinemas in the UK
Watch the trailer below:
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