Review: Skyscraper

Skyscraper (3D / SPOILERS)
Cert: 12A / 102 mins / Dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber / Trailer



This is a film which features an innovative tech/real-estate project overseen by a hubristic billionaire. He gathers a group of experts (one of whom has their young family in tow) to give them the grand tour and get the insurance signed off before opening to the public. This is going well until it transpires that a disgruntled employee has sold out his boss to a rival, has hacked the security systems and ends up dead while the guests and organisers alike are trapped in the chaos, fighting for their lives as the whole thing goes to hell around them.

I thought Skyscraper would be Die Hard With A Wooden Leg, but it turned out to be Vertical Jurassic Park instead. So don't make assumptions, kids.

I won't bother summarising the plot, it's all very much in the trailer, there*¹.

Yes, it's the Summer so this is Action Flick 101, and Dwayne Johnson continues his trend of accepting jobs without fully reading synopses in Rawson Marshall Thurber's concrete-shattering opus. The action may take place in Hong Kong, but his is a piece of entertainment in the most American of traditions*².

The end result is nowhere near as awful as it could have been, but so staggeringly average that it feels like a criminal waste of its $125m budget. The film's central location, The Pearl, is apparently 220 floors of relentlessly telegraphed cliché, built on foundations of exposition, callbacks and deus ex machina. The cinematic equivalent of a dot-to-dot book, the story lurches from one set-piece to the next like a 260lb ex-SWAT agent with a prosthetic limb. Despite his considerable screen presence and innate likeability, even Dwayne Johnson can't make this interesting*³.

And because it's a 12A, none of the point-blank gunshots have exit-wounds. A trivial point I know, but I'll bring it up anyway. I thought at one point this might have been the most clockwork genre-flick I'd seen all year, then I remembered Den of Thieves.

But if you've never seen any action movies ever, this will be great.

Die Hard.
Yeah, I know everyone's saying that.
That's because it's inescapably true.



Oh, watch it in the cinema if anything, because this will lose most of its impact on the journey to your small screen. And bravely clinging on to a rapidly-dying format, you'd perhaps think that the 3D would be utilised to showcase the vertiginous heights of the drama at the world's tallest building to better effect. But no, the extra dimension is used to make things darker, blurrier and with heavy ghosting of any point of light in the background..



Stream if you must, I suppose.



It's not.



We might.



There isn't.



Level 2: Neve Campbell's in this, and she was in that Scream 3 alongside Carrie 'Leia' Fisher.





*¹ Although there's at least one major dialogue exchange in the trailer which didn't make it into the final cut. God knows how many test-edits of this film are in a cupboard at Universal somewhere... ^{[ BACK ]}

*² As well as the genre standard of having a morally-untouchable hero who's an invalided service-veteran put in a perilous situation while providing for his young white-picket-fence family (this is basically a Mark Wahlberg movie), there's probably a separate review to be written about a Hollywood's gleeful presentation of a Chinese entrepreneur saved from European gangsters by American hetero-masculinity. But I'm too tired to dig that hole, frankly… ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ And seriously though, why would that massive screen be on, with the public ooh-ing, ahh-ing and gasping through a live feed (multiple camera sources apparently) of what is clearly an ongoing police/military emergency, being left to stand around at the foot of the world's tallest building as it burns and begins to collapse? ^{[ BACK ]}


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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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