Skyscraper (2018)
IMDB Rating : 6.2/10 (as on 21.07.2018)
PG-13 | 1h 42min | Action, Crime, Drama
A father goes to great lengths to save his family from a
burning skyscraper.
Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Writer: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Stars: Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell, Chin Han
IMDB link
Needs
To Die A Little Harder
Scott Mendelson
Skyscraper
is an example of how a high-concept can only go so far without colorful
characters. The action thriller, written and directed by Rawson Marshall
Thurber, is a hybrid of Die Hard and The Towering Inferno, minus the
vividly-sketched heroes and villains of the 1988 action classic and the big
scale and bigger stars of the 1974 mega-hit. It (barely) works as passable
popcorn entertainment, but it is confined by its own narrative claustrophobia
and its bare-bones plotting. For too much of the movie, Skyscraper leaves its
hero stranded with nothing to do beyond the next trailer-friendly stunt.
The
picture gets off to a strong start, with a prologue explaining how FBI agent
Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) suffered a career-ending injury and put his life
back together. There is a poignancy in this former he-man “laying down his
sword” and finding joy in a more conventional family unit, and there is a
relatability to this blue-collar security specialist terrified of blowing his
shot at the big time. His introductory scenes with his wife (Neve Campbell,
giving a lot more than what’s on the page) show an adult chemistry and a
lived-in spark.
But
once the plot kicks into gear, the characters are mostly separated from each
other, and a (minor) plot turn writes out at least one of the more interesting
relationships. The first act contains some fine character work and one terrific
hand-to-hand smackdown. Once Johnson races into the inferno to try to rescue
his family, Skyscraper falls into a pattern. Much of the film’s second and
third acts feature Johnson, entirely by himself, setting up and partaking in
one larger-than-life stunt after another. And none of the main characters get
to interact with each other.
The
Die Hard-ish material feels muted even as the baddies kill a lot of people. The
main heavy (Roland Møller) is so bland that we keep expecting someone else to
be revealed as the real puppet master. Hannah Quinlivan looks stylish in what
is an homage to the whole “silent bad-ass female villain” thing in nearly every
Die Hard sequel, but she gets so little screen time that you’ll almost forget
about her. And the building’s owner, Chin Han, gets a lovely introductory scene
before mostly vanishing and becoming a glorified blank slate.
By
separating its entire cast from each other, nobody gets much in the way of
conversations (beyond occasional “Go now!” or “Look out!” exposition. Johnson
is fine as a terrified-but-determined super-dad, but he spends most of the
movie talking to himself because he’s entirely on his own. Ditto his wife, his
would-be nemesis, the guy he’s (somewhat) trying to save and the cops down
below who first suspect and then begin to believe in this unlikely hero. The
stunt work is vertigo-inducing, but far more emphasis is placed upon the
mechanics than the character work.
The
one clever bit is how news cameras end up broadcasting Will’s attempts to get
into the building, which means that we get to see crowds cheering him on as he
tries to save the day. The “framed for the fire” thing never pays off, and the
action doesn’t get terribly creative until right at the end (no spoilers, but
the climactic showdown is neat). The relatively small cast and its lack of
isolating narrative make it feel less like a Die Hard movie and more like one
of those 1990’s straight-to-VHS Die Hard knock-offs.
Skyscraper
mostly works as a low-stakes (aside from Johnson's trapped wife/kids, the only
thing in peril is a mostly evacuated burning building), small-scale B-movie
action flick dressed up inside a huge burning building and expansive Hong Kong
exteriors. Johnson is the only character afforded much depth, and even he
spends most of the movie just going through the action motions. Skyscraper suffers
from a lack of a scene-stealing baddie, plot twists and inventive action. While
not quite a disaster, Skyscraper is less Die Harder and more Die Hardly.
Read complete review at Forbes
Movie Rating: ★★★★☆
Dwayne Johnson rocks in a highly enjoyable action film
Wendy
Ide
Wayne
Johnson stars as the most badass amputee since Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury
Road, in the movie mashup you never knew you wanted (but trust me, you do).
Skyscraper is Die Hard meets The Towering Inferno (High Hard, if you will), and
it’s pretty much everything you could want from a big, dumb, muscle-bound
summer action flick. Johnson plays Will Sawyer, a security specialist whose
wife and kids happen to be inside the world’s tallest building after shady,
sneering Euro-accented villains set fire to it as part of a needlessly
complicated heist. Using his in-depth knowledge of the building and so much
duct tape you start to wonder whether this is a feature-length advert for the
stuff, Will sets out to save his family. Not surprisingly, this involves him
dangling repeatedly from the side of the building (once by his prosthetic leg).
It’s gloriously silly escapism and I enjoyed it immensely.
Read complete review at The Guardian
Dwayne Johnson Scales a Tower of Clichés
Manohla Dargis
At one point in the insistently, nay, proudly ridiculous
thriller “Skyscraper” the hero played by Dwayne Johnson assures the audience
what it’s known from the start: “This is stupid.” It’s hard not to wonder if
the writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber built the entire movie around this
redundant truism. And why not? All he had to do was pad it with some recycling,
bank on his relationship with Mr. Johnson — they worked together on “Central
Intelligence,” as mocking a title as Hollywood has produced — and Mr. Thurber
had his elevator pitch: “The Towering Inferno” meets “Die Hard” but in China.
Box-office domination was guaranteed as soon as the seven-figure deal was
signed.
Mostly, Will gets to work, or rather Mr. Johnson does, as
the character undergoes the hero’s crucible of suffering with throbbing
muscles, an impressive deadpan and yards of duct tape. As is always the case in
male-driven fantasies like this, an ordinary man rises, just and noble and
true, and transforms into a hero. As he rises, Will dodges bullets and more
bullets, scales a soaring construction crane and leaps across an impossible
void, a superhero without cape or portfolio. Again and again, he also dangles
by a single, sweat-slicked Hitchcockian hand as all of Hong Kong anxiously
watches his escapades below or on TV, oohing and ahhing in presumptive harmony
with the movie’s audience.
There are intermittent pleasures, including Ms. Campbell,
who seems ready to transition to a new career phase playing hard-hitting
maternal types with Mona Lisa smiles. Mostly, though, “Skyscraper” is about the
movie’s other, far more towering figure: Mr. Johnson, a performer whose
colossal physicality is strikingly complemented by a delicate expressivity too
rarely seen in contemporary blockbusters. He doesn’t have to do all that much
here, but as one of the last authentic monuments to he-man masculinity, he
easily holds you rapt. (To see him flex more than muscles, check out the
unfairly maligned fantasy film “Southland Tales” or his work on the HBO show
“Ballers.”)
Blockbusters like “Skyscraper” are near-indestructible
entertainment delivery systems partly because they inoculate themselves against
criticism with winking self-awareness — hence Will’s “stupid” line and the
succession of increasingly outrageous physics-and-logic-defying stunts. Mr.
Thurber ups the ante with cinematic allusions (“The Lady From Shanghai”) that
feel like reviewer bait, and wouldn’t you know, I took it. Of course I did.
That’s part of the contract, as is my noting that it’s welcome how race quietly
figures into the story without becoming a problem that needs solving. And it is
genuinely welcome even if it would have been nicer if the movie had tried
harder on every other count
Read complete review at New York Times
Movie Rating: ★★☆☆☆
More burnt-out wheelie bin than Towering Inferno
Robbie
Collin
Going on the
strident advertising for Skyscraper, you would think Universal had come up with
a modern-day Towering Inferno. Alas, the end result holds all the appeal of a
burnt-out wheelie bin. Here is a bland and perfunctory disaster film in which
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson saves his family from a terrorist group’s firebomb
strike on the world’s newly unveiled tallest building.
The overt
invocation of the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks is now par for the course in
the action-adventure strand of Johnson’s career: see also 2015’s San Andreas
and this year’s Rampage, both of which also had the wrestler-turned-movie-star
embark on a 9/11-esque rescue operation with a fantastical slant (one
apocalyptic earthquake, one giant gorilla gone berserk).
The
difference this time is there is virtually nothing else to it: just Johnson
dangling over unconvincing CGI precipices while people occasionally shoot at
him, interspersed with relentlessly earnest declarations of fatherly love that
call to mind a post-divorce Peter Andre.
After an
hour or so, the film rolls out its signature stunt, as extensively hawked in
the trailers: Johnson leaping from the prow of a construction crane into the
ninety-somethingth floor of the burning building itself.
On the
ground below a gathering crowd cheers him on, as does at least one police
officer – even though at this point in proceedings, Johnson’s character is
suspected of being responsible for the blast, and his mugshot is all over the
rolling news.
For a film
with an incredibly straightforward premise – effectively, man goes upstairs –
Skyscraper trips over itself an awful lot.
The Sawyers
are the Pearl’s first and, to date, only civilian residents. And this means
they are also the only potential casualties when a squad of extraordinarily
well-equipped bad guys set fire to the place and disable the sprinkler system,
in the hope of convincing the developer (Chin Han) to part with, of all things,
a sensitive USB stick.
Handily, the
place seems to have been constructed with a Die Hard-like stand-off in mind.
Key features include a vertiginous garden atrium, some treacherous wind
turbines with an important control panel in between, and a spherical penthouse
full of mirror-like plasma screens that’s good for nothing but a confusing
final shoot-out.
Yet the
building itself is a missed opportunity. For one thing, it looks nothing like
an existing piece of architecture and everything like a sound stage with
green-screen trimmings: there are scenes here that make you doubt the actors
are in the same room together, let alone that the room is half a mile up and
also contains an exploding helicopter.
For another,
it’s a total bore design-wise: the only memorable fixtures are a series of
networked gestural control panels and smartwatches that make their users look
like Rimmer saluting on Red Dwarf. Additionally, its relationship with the laws
of physics doesn’t appear to be a binding one. During the collapse of the
atrium, Johnson’s character somehow manages to hold up a crumbling bridge while
standing on it.
The writer
and director is Rawson Marshall Thurber, known for his Ben Stiller-led sports
satire Dodgeball, and pairing Johnson with Kevin Hart in the buddy comedy
Central Intelligence. As such, you would be forgiven for expecting a similarly
light-hearted approach here, but for the most part the film doesn’t even try to
be funny: the welcome exceptions are some creative usage of Will’s prosthetic
leg and a running joke about duct tape, although even that occasionally feels
downplayed.
Could it be
that Thurber originally wrote Skyscraper as a comedy, until it was decided the
project would be better played straight? Either way, it’s a bungalow with
delusions.
Movie Rating: ★★☆☆☆
The Rock jumps off a crane into a burning building. Hey,
it’s summer
Michael
O'Sullivan
There
are few surprises delivered in “Skyscraper,” an entertaining if middlebrow
thriller whose very name — blandly descriptive, generic — seems to advertise
its fungibility. Take two cups of “The Towering Inferno,” half a pound of “Die
Hard” (not necessarily a bad thing, mind you) and stir in every Dwayne Johnson
action movie ever made, until the consistency of cornmeal. Place on the middle
rack of a 3,000-foot Hong Kong high-rise that’s on fire, courtesy of a bad guy
with an indeterminate foreign accent, natch, and sprinkle generously with
cliches. Bake until just underdone.
From
the moment that we meet the nice guy who almost immediately reveals himself to
be bad, to the moment that gun-toting villains introduce themselves by saying,
with transparent falsehood, “It’s okay, we’re the good guys, you’re safe,”
“Skyscraper” is exactly what we all know it to be, and no more: a silly,
forgettable yet moderately watchable showcase for derring-do and special
effects.
Chief
among those effects is Johnson himself, whose charisma burns like a force of
nature. As Will Sawyer, a married father of two who loses a leg in the violent
prologue that opens the film, and who must rescue his family from the world’s
tallest building after arsonists set it on fire, Johnson keeps the film from
flagging, even at its most predictable. (The aptly named Will, an FBI hostage
rescue team leader turned building security consultant, wears a fake leg
throughout the film, making his tenacity more impressive. The prosthesis both
bedevils him and, later, comes in unexpectedly handy, during one of many
hair-raising, if familiar, set pieces.)
Of
course, when thugs break in to the command center that controls the building’s
fire-suppression systems, easily overriding the computer safeguards, the main
hacker (Matt O’Leary) will announce, “I’m in.” And of course there will be a
scene where Will, grimacing, will pull out a piece of jagged metal that has
become embedded in his flesh during a particularly nerve-racking stunt. Bonus
points to writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber (“Central Intelligence”) for
at least giving Johnson this funny line, delivered as Will binds up his
injuries with unorthodox first aid supplies: “If you can’t fix it with duct
tape, then you ain’t using enough duct tape.”
Oddly,
duct tape comes up more than once, making one wonder whether 3M paid for
product placement here. “Skyscraper” is the kind of movie where nothing is
introduced randomly. When, early in the film, the skyscraper’s owner (Chin Han)
shows off some weirdly specific high-tech features of his building, you can bet
that one of those high-tech features will play an important role later. And it
does, even if it’s in the context of a scene that is a clear rip-off of —
excuse me, homage to — Orson Welles’s “The Lady From Shanghai.”
Despite
its flaws, “Skyscraper” avoids the worst offenses of some of Johnson’s most
preposterous starring vehicles. (I’m looking at you, “San Andreas.”) The film’s
central stunt — depicted on the poster and in the trailer — in which Will
attempts to jump from the arm of a wobbly tower crane to the interior of the
burning building, is at once stomach-churning and viscerally satisfying. It’s
so well staged that, despite its patent absurdity, you may find yourself
wanting to break out in cheers, along with the on-screen crowd of gawkers that
gathers in the street below the building, as you watch Will clamber around, as
one character describes the flaming high-rise, “a $6.5 billion chimney.”
Nor
is “Skyscraper” totally devoid of wonder. The climax contains a notably
satisfying, if small, twist. But the biggest element of the unforeseen?
“Skyscraper” — the movie, that is, not the building — never goes up in smoke.
Read complete review at Washington Post
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