Skyscraper (Review)
Skyscraper Suffers From Structurally Unsound Storytelling.
I’ve been a fan of The Rock ever since he made the transition from the ring to the big screen. Recently though I feel as though he’s pulling a Nicolas Cage or Samuel L. Jackson and is saturating the market with his “brand.” In other words, the hardest working man in Hollywood seems to be about the quantity rather than the quality, which is not a legacy anyone really wants to be remembered for. As much as he’s been teetering on this edge with recent movies like Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Rampage, but Skyscraper pushes him right into the realm of mediocrity.
Let’s just get this out of the way, Skyscraper desperately wants to be Die Hard except bigger and better. It’s got the villain with an obscure European accent (South African, maybe?), a gruff hero who has to save his wife (and or family), and more foreshadowing than you can shake a stick at. The real question is, can anything really be better than Die Hard? The answer is, despite being bigger Skyscraper only proves that size doesn’t matter when it comes to storytelling.
Like I said before, I like Dwayne Johnson. He seems like a really good guy and one that works incredibly hard for everything he has. However, that’s not an excuse for him playing pretty much the same character these days. I had high hopes that he wouldn’t be another Schwarzenegger or Stallone. Unfortunately, he’s proven that I’m nothing more than a sweet summer child when it comes to my optimism for Hollywood these days. Luckily, he’s joined by a few actors I was actually excited to see on screen again. Pablo Schreiber only appears in Skyscraper for a few minutes, but I’m quickly becoming a big fan of his after Den of Thieves. The fact that he actually makes Dwayne Johnson look like a normal sized person next to him is just the cherry on top of his cameo. Then there’s Neve Campbell who I haven’t seen on screen in years but is a welcomed addition to the film. It’s too bad I can’t say the same for her character though. After all, she plays a Naval surgeon and yet her husband is the one “bringing home the bacon.” It seems like a lot more like her character should have been the hero of this film than him, but hey that’s an idea for another, better movie.
Skyscraper is a hopelessly paint by numbers action movie. It very clearly has a checklist of sequences and themes that it slowly works its way through to make a painfully lackluster and formulaic film. Sure, this might give it a solid foundation to build off of, but there’s nothing there to make it stand out among the skyline that makes up the genre. It never takes any risks with its storytelling or characters, and instead creates a film where everything could have been undone by a single moment of the characters using common sense. That’s probably because the architect of Skyscraper is writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber, a director who is best known for movies like We’re the Millers and Central Intelligence. Let’s just say that it’s clear that he’s stepping out of his comfort zone with Skyscraper and picked up a copy of “Action Movies for Dummies” before starting in on the screenplay for it.
Honestly, there was no way that Skyscraper was ever going to be a good movie. After all, it’s a film about a man trying to save his family from terrorists who have taken over the world’s tallest building and set it on fire. I want you to take a moment and let that sink in for a moment. The premise is that the bad guys lock themselves into a building and then light it on fire. If you’re thinking that this might not be the most well thought out plan, then you pretty much have hit the nail on the head when it comes to the problem with Skyscraper as a whole. It’s just not a well thought out or particularly smart film. Still, there was no reason why this couldn’t at least be a fun mindless time at movies. The downside is that even without all the competition from better films out right now, I don’t think Skyscraper is even that much fun. It’s certainly not bad. It’s just… Competent. Unfortunately, competent doesn’t make for a movie I’ll be OK with watching on basic cable one lazy Sunday in the future.
Essentially Skyscraper is a movie that has a few death-defying moments that are cool, but more than likely to give anyone with a fear of heights a panic attack. Unfortunately, a few cool moments don’t make up for a script that follows every “rule” of filmmaking and feels more like a film students final projects (minus the creativity). The thing is that none of this makes Skyscraper a bad film, just a disappointing one. Even though I wasn’t expecting much walking into this movie, it was still underwhelming. All I can do is what I do after most Dwayne Johnson movies these days though, and that’s shrug and hope he’s done for the year.
