“Skyscraper”– Movie Review

This week, I attended an advanced screening of the new action thriller, “Skyscraper”, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Neve Campbell.

Synopsis

When a Chinese tower is ablaze, can the American security expert hired to assess its safety rescue his family trapped inside?

Story

When it finally opens in Hong Kong, The Pearl will be the world’s tallest building – and that’s where Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) comes in.  Sawyer is a security expert who has been hired by the building’s billionaire real estate developer Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han) to ensure that the structure is totally secure.  For Sawyer, this is something of a forced career change; having worked previously as a member of a SWAT team, he was severely injured on one case – his left leg had to be amputated below the knee, requiring him to wear a prosthetic device.  A decade later, he’s now happily married to Sarah (Neve Campbell) and they have two children.

Having completed a preliminary inspection of the various security and safety systems installed in the building, Sawyer reports to Zhao that The Pearl is in pretty good shape –but the inspection is not yet complete.  Sawyer will have to visit the remote location which is the central headquarters that manages the building’s security and safety systems. Unknown to either Sawyer or Zhao, the software that controls the building has been hacked by a nefarious crime syndicate out to seek revenge on Zhao.  But in order to totally fully take control of the building, they steal the tablet Zhao gave Sawyer – a device which allows him to biometrically authenticate into the system as an administrator to inspect the system in detail.

Putting their plan into motion, the criminals set fire to one of the floors in The Pearl; after disabling the anti-fire system, the edifice will likely burn to the ground.  But there’s one thing that they didn’t take into consideration: Sarah and her children would still be in the construction at the time the fire starts. Trapped inside with no way out of the building, Sarah must protect her family from the fire while simultaneously dealing with the criminals who caused the blaze in the first place.  Can Sawyer somehow manage to rescue his family while also bringing the criminals to justice?

Review

The Rock on only one leg can still kick butt – and for that matter, so can his wife (who is also a combat surgeon who fluently speaks Chinese … but perhaps that’s giving away a bit too much).  That said, maybe the real star of the movie is duct tape -- yes, duct tape. One of the lines Johnson has goes, “If you can’t fix it with duct tape, then you’re just not using enough duct tape!”.  In fact, the studio, Universal, believes in it so much that at this particular screening, they used as a marketing tool a roll of duct tape – that is to say, they were giving away rolls for free as a way of promoting the film.  No joke – the word “Skyscraper” was emblazoned across the roll of duct tape. (If you’re not getting it now, you will when you see “Skyscraper”)

But enough about duct tape.  While the movie might be reminiscent of “Die Hard” where Johnson would be the Bruce Willis character, the script of “Skyscraper” is nowhere near clever enough to compare it to “Die Hard”; there are no jokes – in fact, one complaint about the film may be that it seems to be taking itself way too seriously.  It might’ve benefited from more humor as a wink to the audience. The script, of course, isn’t always clear or logical in its story or motivations – but then again, you don’t see a motion picture like this expecting nuance and symbolism or allusions to Italian post-war neo-realism. The greatest applause by the audience came in the explosions. 

If an old style action movie is what would make you happy to while away a summer day or night, then purchase a big tub of popcorn and barrel of soda and check your brain with the theater’s ticket-taker and run straight to the next screening of “Skyscraper”.  There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, even if you did take that last sentence to be derisive in its tone. But having said that, the experience may instead leave you yearning for something a bit better – in which case, you may want to go home and stream all of the “Die Hard” movies as a reminder of how it’s done properly. 

IMDB