“In order to be brave, we gotta be a little scared.”--Will Sawyer
My first thought about “Skyscraper” was that it looked dumb as
a bag of rocks. And it is. But at least it’s a small bag.
I admit I liked this movie a lot more than I ever thought I
would. It actually manages to coax a performance out of Dwayne Johnson that
could be credible considered as… acting. No curled eyebrows, no winking at the
audience, no ‘roided-up bicep flexing. He actually inhabits a character and
invests him with something like dimensions.
All this is set against a backdrop of fires, explosions and
machine guns, of course. The former WWE wrestler known as “The Rock” still
knows his audience, who like the smell of his cooking, and insist that he keep
on cooking that recipe -- or something.
(I never watched a lot of wrestling.)
Johnson plays Will Sawyer, a former military badass turned
FBI badass who… got blown up in bad op, lost his leg and now has become a
rather self-doubting family man. Looking a little thick in the face, with a
scraggly grey beard and doe-ish eyes, Johnson manages to project a decent
amount of vulnerability for a guy the size of an NFL linebacker.
“I just kinda put my sword down,” he says to his old squad
mate, Ben (Pablo Schreiber), who has recruited him to do a security assessment
of The Pearl -- the world’s newly christened tallest building, courtesy of an
ambitious Hong Kong billionaire, Zhao Min Zhi (Chin Han). He even brings along
his wife, Sarah (Neve Campbell), who’s also the military surgeon who saved his
life, and their adorable, peril-prone moppets (McKenna Roberts, Noah Cottrell).
Of course, nefarious bad guys with vague European accents
(Roland Møller chief among them) are up to no good, sealing off the building
and setting the 96th floor ablaze, while also disabling the fire
control systems. The flames gradually higher as our hero battles the villains
in a confined space while striving to protect his loved ones.
If all this sounds like “Die Hard” shotgun married to
“Blazing Inferno,” that’s because it is.
Still, it’s hard to deny this is a fun flick. And it’s nice
to see a character with a disability as the hero of an action thriller. Will
gets around pretty well on his prosthetic leg, and even manages to use it as a
prop several times during some of the more acrobatic sequences. Writer/director
Rawson Marshall Thurber, who previously teamed with Johnson on “Central Intelligence,”
resists the urge to have him take the leg off and start whacking bad guys with
it.
Of course, you've got to swallow a lot of action movie
stupidity along the way. Like a tall building being lit on fire in the middle,
the flames gradually engulfing higher stories, yet somehow the superstructure
remains perfectly intact without collapsing in on itself, as basic engineering
principles would dictate.
It's not like there's a real-life contrary example from the
recent past that literally every single person on Earth is aware of...
Speaking of which, I talked to a few people afterward who
admit they were a bit triggered by the 9/11 resemblance. I was more bothered by
the transgressions against Physics 101.
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