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. 

Review: "Atomic Blonde"

Look, I see a daggone lot of movies -- 200 a year, I reckon -- so it’s pretty hard to impress me. I’m the guy who yawns at a 20-second piece of CGI that cost $5 million and took a team of computer animators six months to create. But there were parts of “Atomic Blonde” where I had to scoop my jaw off the sticky floor of the theater.

Essentially the first imitator in the “John Wick” mold, this spy action/thriller combines unbelievable kick-butt stunt sequences with a whole lot of intrigue and double crosses. Charlize Theron plays Lorraine Broughton, a British MI6 agent sent into the rat’s nest of Berlin on the eve of the Wall coming down in 1989.

The plot is a largely forgettable dance through the usual spy movie tropes: enemies, allies, those lying somewhere in between, all sides playing the long game of leverage, with the threat of a double agent and a MacGuffin-esque “list” that could bring the whole order tumbling down.

What sets “Blonde” apart are the in-your-face stunts. Director David Leitch is a rookie behind the camera but a veteran stunt coordinator -- much the same as "Wick" -- and he shows an audacious verve that kicks the usual hand-to-hand combat scenes to the next level.

The high point is a sequence on a flight of stairs that segues from one group of opponents to the next, with the camera following Broughton every step of the way. She gets thrown down a flight, the camera tumbles right along with her. And Leitch uses minimal cutting, so we get to see the whole thing play out from beginning to end, as the combatants grow battered and exhausted.

Theron proves an able physical presence, completely believable as someone who could take on her all-male gallery of adversaries. She also brings subtle acting chops to the connective scenes, lending Broughton a haunted quality -- a deceiver and killer who flings herself into the life she’s chosen, but doesn’t enjoy it.

James McAvoy plays David Percival, a fellow Brit agent who acts as her sneering host, helper and foil. He’s been stationed in East Berlin for a decade, carving out an identity as a black market dealer in Western goods and information. Percival knows everyone, has all the angles covered, is familiar with the back ways and hidden passages. What’s unclear is where his true loyalties lie.

Based on the graphic novel, “The Coldest City” by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart, the screenplay by Kurt Johnstad (“300”) is long on too-cool mood and punk imagery. What people say isn’t nearly as important as how and why they are saying it.

It seems a Soviet intelligence agent code-named Spyglass (Eddie Marsan) is ready to defect, and is dangling a list that contains the identities of every known spy of every nationality. Everyone is desperate to get their hands on it, so the orders are “trust no one.”

Sofia Boutella plays a mysterious French woman tagging along everywhere, whose importance will grow. Roland Møller is Bremovych, the local Russian chief, who has hands in every pot. Bill Skarsgård plays a helpful young proto-computer geek, and Daniel Bernhardt is memorable as a local tough who goes toe-to-toe with our heroine in a couple of brutal blond vs. blonde matchups.

The film is told through the framing device of a debriefing interview back in West Berlin, where Broughton has turned up beaten to a pulp, her mission failed. Toby Jones and John Goodman play English and American spooks, respectively, giving her the business and trying to interrogate some straight answers out of her.

Theron works the poker face, letting her mask slip but once.

Sexy, smart and seriously high-energy, “Atomic Blonde” is like James Bond mixed up with steampunk fantasy and a heavy dollop of feminism. John Wick, meet your match.

Review: "Land of Mine"

An Oscar nominee for best foreign language film, “Land of Mine” looks at a true piece of largely forgotten history and provides a fictional take on what life must have been like for the people caught up in those times. Specifically, young German POWs -- boys, really -- who were forced to clear mines from Allied beaches after World War II.

They were essentially slave labor in a deadly game that had as much to do with retribution as demilitarization. Something like 2,000 German soldiers were conscripted to remove mines in Denmark, with a casualty rate approaching 50 percent.

This Danish-German production, written and directed by Martin Zandvliet, is a powerful ensemble piece that looks at a group of teenagers, with no one character really standing apart from the crowd. This is by design, as the actors are representing more archetypes than specific people.

Also, considering the rate at which they die or are maimed -- in some cases, by their own deliberate actions -- it’s probably best that we don’t identify too strongly with any one of them. Louis Hofmann plays Sebastian, sort of the default leader of the POWs.

Roland Møller plays Rasmussen, the hardcase Danish sergeant who is placed in charge of the group. A burly, seasoned veteran who despises the Germans -- in the opening scene, he is depicted beating a retreating soldier senseless with little provocation -- he’s none too pleased with his assignment.

At first he treats them with outright cruelty, refusing even to bring them anything to eat. Food is scarce after the devastation of the war and German POWs are at the bottom of the feeding list -- but Rasmussen doesn’t make much of an attempt to hurry things along.

Eventually, though, he starts to warm up to his charges -- even defending them when his lieutenant and some other drunken officers show up to harass and humiliate them.

The Germans are passive and resigned to defeat. Most of them are mere boys, Hitler Youth and the like who were called up at the end of the war and never saw much real fighting. One lad is a bit older, a self-proclaimed veteran who even sports a mustache, who is determined to escape. It shouldn’t be hard, as they are kept inside a ramshackle hut near the beach. But the others forcibly prevent him from bringing harsh treatment down upon the rest of them.

Zandvliet shows us the actual harrowing process of finding and defusing mines, their young hands searching for and unscrewing the firing mechanism at the top. They go through a nerve-rattling training process, and soon the mines are being removed so quickly that it’s easy to be tricked into treating it as routine -- with deadly results.

Movies about WWII in which Germans or Japanese are treated sympathetically are still problematic for some people. I remember the outcry when “Das Boot” came out more than three decades ago and depicted a U-boat crew as resolute and even heroic.

In war, it’s possible to demonstrate nobility in service to an evil regime, or to show cruelty in fighting for a cause that is just. “Land of Mine” is a wise and worthy film that understands that acts of depravity know no national borders.