Video review: "Skyscraper"

I’ve frequently complained about Dwayne Johnson’s choices of role. After doing some interesting work during the early part of his movie career, he downshifted into musclebound lunkhead action roles, the sort of braggadocios alpha male type I’ve come to loathe onscreen -- basically, Schwarzenegger II.

Then he turns around and actually tackles a more complex part, playing a disabled ex-military guy with PTSD and a lot of self-doubt. And the movie bombs, at least at the domestic box office.

This is why no one should take career advice from movie critics.

Johnson plays Will Sawyer, an Army/FBI team leader who switched to designing security systems after an op went bad, leaving him with a prosthetic leg and a lot of regret. His buddy Ben (Pablo Schreiber) hooks him up to do the security work on The Pearl, a next-gen building in Hong Kong that will be the tallest in the world.

While they’re doing the final run-through some very “Die Hard”-esque international bad guys show up and start blasting the place apart with bullets and explosions. Will has brought along his family (Neve Campbell, McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell) for the trip, so of course they’re caught up in the peril.

The movie itself is a pretty straight-forward action/thriller, with plenty of fight scenes and CGI action. It’s nice to see Johnson -- or anyone, for that matter -- playing a hero who’s not automatically the most physically capable person in a room. And he even refrains from the usual quips, eye rolls and bicep-flexing that has become his M.O.

It’s not a great movie, and you kind of have to tuck your sense of logic aside at points. But “Skyscraper” is a genuinely entertaining FLICK with Dwayne Johnson showing a little ambition as an actor.

Bonus features are decent, cemented by a feature-length commentary track by director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who also worked with Johnson on “Central Intelligence.” Pity the actor didn’t join the director for this track. Thurber also provides commentary on a number of deleted or extended scenes.

There are also six making-of documentary shorts that focus on different aspects of production. The most interesting is a talk with Jeff Glasbrenner, the real-life amputee and motivational speaker who inspired the character of Will.

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Review: "Skyscraper"

“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 96^th 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. 

Video review: "Edge of Tomorrow."

American ticket buyers continue to give Tom Cruise movies the stink-eye, but that doesn’t mean the films aren’t any good. Case in point: “Edge of Tomorrow,” a solid science-fiction thriller that didn’t amount to any great shakes at the domestic box office (though it fared better overseas).

The concept is mash-up of familiar ideas we’ve seen in other movies: creepy alien bugs are threatening to take over the Earth, and we’ve got to stand our ground. Cruise plays William Cage, a smarmy advertising exec-turned military spokesman, who finds himself dumped into a massive assault effort without any combat training or experience.

And… he dies.

Not surprising, given his applicable skillset (or lack thereof). What is surprising is that he wakes up, alive, and it’s the morning before the operation. He gives the mission another go. And dies. And tries again. Dies… though he lives a little longer this time.

It seems Cage got infected with some alien goo that affords him the power to travel through time and “reset the day,” a la “Groundhog Day.” So he makes it his duty to keep trying to find a winning solution to the disastrous war plan. He recruits an ally in Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), the gruff war hero he helped turn into a celebrity.

The action scenes are frenetic and absorbing, with Cage having to learn to use one of those cool exo-skeleton/armor thingees that seem so prevalent in sci-fi flicks these days. Director Doug Liman directed the first, and best, Jason Bourne movie, and knows how to keep the main character seem grounded amidst a fantastical backdrop.

The aliens are a bit of a disappointment, resembling balls of metallic tentacles that roll and thrash around the screen. They’re video-game boogums, meant to scare us and be blown away.

“Edge of Tomorrow” has occasional bouts of supreme silliness, but it’s worth a look… or two.

Video extras are OK. The DVD version comes with two featurettes: “Weapons Of The Future” and “Creatures Not Of This World.” Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo pack and you add another featurette on filming the storming of the beach, deleted scenes, an interview with Liman and an “Adrenaline Cut” of the film’s signature action scenes.

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Review: "Edge of Tomorrow"

Some people are bound to dismiss "Edge of Tomorrow" as a mash-up of other, better science fiction movies. And there's no denying there are elements of other themes familiar to the genre -- alien invaders, time travel, nifty futuristic hardware, existential questioning of one's identity.

In fact, if someone hasn't already labeled it the love child of "Groundhog Day" and "Starship Troopers," then I'm copywriting the phrase.

But despite coming across as less than original, it's a compelling sci-fi thriller and a solid star vehicle for Tom Cruise. He's taken a beating in the press lately and his last few films haven't fared well at the box office, though I thought last year's "Oblivion" -- with which "Edge of Tomorrow" shares more than a few similarities -- was an exemplary example of the genre.

The kick here is that Cruise's character, William Cage, is thrown into a battle to retake Normandy from the alien bugs, dubbed "mimics." He's had no combat training, and can't even flip off the safety on his weapons. But he strives to persevere against the overwhelming odds and... dies almost immediately. Because that's exactly what would happen to someone in that situation.

Except that he wakes up on the morning of the day before the battle, and has to do it all over again. He lives a little longer the second try, but not much. He wakes up again, stays alive another bit more during the fight, and so on.

It seems that during his first foray, some special alien blood/goo got absorbed into his own system, giving him the same ability the alien overlord has to "reset the day." If things aren't going well for it in the battle, it travels back in time and tries again. Now Cage has the same power to use against the enemy.

The metaphysics and specifics of this are never really explained, and in some ways it's better that the filmmakers don't even try. This is hardcore suspension-of-disbelief territory, so the audience had better just swallow the conceit and move on.

Not only is Cage not a seasoned soldier when his journey begins, he's not even a particularly likeable guy. An advertising flack who lost his business when the invasion tanked the global economy, he was given a major's rank and the job of "selling the war" to young recruits. He was an expert at boosting the cool exo-skeleton "jacket" armor the soldiers wear, and idolizing heroes like Rita "The Angel of Verdun" Vrataski (Emily Blunt), who managed to kill hundreds of mimics on her first combat mission.

Turns out Rita previously had the same ability as Cage, and became an expert killer through hundreds of conquests that were constantly reset. But eventually the power fades, so the two team up to put an end to the hive mind of the aliens before the slaughter on the beach even begins.

If the comparison to "Groundhog Day" seemed a little strange at first, it soon becomes clearer. By reliving the same day over and over again, Cage gets countless attempts to set things right. He saves the life of one of his squad-mates, and maps out the battlefield with Rita in a seemingly futile attempt to win the beach head. He also tries warning his superiors about the disaster about to unfold, which goes nowhere.

There's a lot of action, obviously, but also some unexpected humor and pathos as Cage finds himself growing closer to Rita, only to watch her die day after day. Director Doug Liman ("The Bourne Identity") and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie, Jez and John-Henry Butterworth adapt the novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka by making the main character seem as real and grounded as possible in an unreal and bizarre setting.

If there's a weak spot, it's the aliens, which never really rise above the level of video game threat. Vaguely metallic, they look like balls of tentacles that whirl around the fight, not unlike those rubber Koosh Ball toys. They're just targets waiting to be blown up, and never seem to gather any real power of menace.

Still, "Edge of Tomorrow" is clearly a better-than-average science fiction thriller. Even if it steals from other movies, at least it borrows from the best.