Skyscraper

The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) is likeable enough on screen.  He has never been in a film that I could honestly classify as “good.” But he does have the ability to make you enjoy what you’re watching.  The absurdity of a film like San Andreas is slightly easier to accept when it’s the over-sized and seemingly fearless Johnson flying helicopters and rescuing people from falling buildings.  In Skyscraper (2018; dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber) he rescues his wife and children from a burning three-hundred-meter-tall skyscraper in Hong Kong.  The building is a product of ultra-technology and the arrogance that supposedly accompanies it and is protected by a security and safety system that is intricate, computer-controlled, and composed of multiple layers so that failure is an impossibility.  And of course, failure is inevitable.  The Rock is brought in by the building’s owner and designer to certify that the security system is flawless.  Once he gives that judgment, terrorists move in to disable the system, trapping Dwayne’s family on one of the upper floors.  The Rock climbs, vaults, claws, fights, and schemes his way up the skyscraper to rescue his wife and children from joint and individual perils, though it is his wife (Neve Campbell) who finally figures out how to turn the system back on, which puts anti-fire measures into place that defeat the conflagration. 

I spent much of the latter portion of the film wondering when the building would collapse and when the film would end.  It all became too much—too much tension, too many moments of life or death danger, too much DGI fire.  In fact, the entire film, from The Rock’s fake leg to the building itself, is DGI.  It must have been shot wholly within a studio.  It struck me as odd that as the Rock went through the motions of rescuing his family, climbing up the side of the flaming three-thousand-foot building, citizens of Hong Kong stood on the streets below watching and cheering.  They did not know what we in the audience know: the Rock will not die.  He’s The Rock, after all.

All the Die Hard films loom large in the background of this one, as does Towering Inferno (1975).