[usr 3.5]
A father goes to great lengths to save his family from a burning skyscraper.
I love disaster movies, titles like “2012,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” and “Independence Day,” are good old-fashioned escapist entertainment. And Roland Emmerich is the man responsible for those big, overblown, exciting celluloid masterpieces. Well, as far as that genre goes anyway. But! And I stress but, you have to go back to the 1970s to see where Mr. Emerich got his inspiration. A filmmaker by the name of Irwin Allen, who in the ’60s made “The Lost World,” “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” and the TV shows “Lost in Space” and “The Time Tunnel,” would have to wait until the ’70s before Hollywood really stood up and took notice. Starting with “The Poseidon Adventure,” “The Towering Inferno,” “The Swarm,” and finally, “When Time Ran Out,” Mr. Allen knew how to make a BIG movie. And each of his films had the biggest names in Hollywood at the time, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Sally Field, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Jacqueline Bisset, James Franciscus, Richard Chamberlain, Henry Fonda, Gene Hackman, and many more lit up the screen as the building around them burned to the ground, or their cruise ship turned completely over in the water because of a rogue wave, or the long-dormant volcano erupted and tore an island in half. The point is, “Skyscraper” so desperately wants to join that prestigious lineup of classic disaster movies, that instead of paying homage to them, it doesn’t just borrow some of their scenes, it outright steals from them.
Dwayne Johnson plays Will Sawyer, a former FBI agent and amputee who now lives in Hong Kong with his wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) and two kids. They currently live in the tallest skyscraper in the world called “The Pearl,” and he is told it is impenetrable. The bottom half of the tower includes restaurants and shops but the top half will house residential apartments but before the building’s owner, Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han), can open the apartments to the public, he needs to have an independent security contractor inspect that portion of the building and sign off on it as being safe. Will is that man and shortly after he scrutinizes every aspect of the building, he gives the all-clear and informs Zhao that everything looks good. But things go from good to bad when terrorists attack and set fire to the centermost part of the building, letting the flames engulf each floor so it can slowly make its way towards the penthouse suite, where Zhao has managed to lock himself away. Apparently, he has something the terrorists want and in order to retrieve it, they take Will’s family hostage and force him to make his way to the top of the building to get what they want, otherwise, they will kill his family. Now, Will must use every technique he can muster, to appease the bad guys and save his family.
While the movie overall, is entertaining, it never dares to step outside its own comfort zone. And that’s a shame because a film like this is just begging for some original circumstance to materialize so it can blow the audience away. Unfortunately, it never does. Dwayne Johnson more than holds his own as an action hero but trying to play the everyman, the way Harrison Ford and Kevin Costner were always able to achieve, falls way short. As a tough government agent in the “Fast and Furious” movies, or even Hercules, the big man stands tall and can pretty much pummel any adversary into the ground, but here, even his huge 20-inch biceps are no match for the world’s tallest building. Neve Campbell makes a welcome return to the big screen as Will’s tough-as-nails ex-Navy wife Sarah who can more than take care of herself but the real star here is The Pearl. Using state-of-the-art CGI, the filmmakers have made the building so believably authentic, people at the screening actually started asking if the skyscraper was real. The action scenes are textbook and offer nothing new and as I mentioned earlier, the movie flat out steals scenes from far superior pictures.
While trying to scale the outside of the building, he uses double-sided duct tape on his hands so he can keep his grip, reminiscent of Tom Cruise in “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” scaling the Burj Khalifa in Dubai with magnetic gloves. Or the premise of terrorists taking over a skyscraper, forcing the hero to fight back and save the day, just like Bruce Willis in “Die Hard.” And in one scene, where Will and Sarah get caught on a collapsing bridge over burning flames and twisted metal, Sarah must walk a very unstable plank of wood spanning the chasm with one of her kids on her back while Will tries to steady the bridge, and most people will not be familiar with this scene but it comes directly out of the aforementioned Irwin Allen disaster flick, “When Time Ran Out.” The scene in that movie had a collapsed bridge, minus a very thin rail, which spanned a flowing river of lava from an erupting volcano, and was much more effective. Had the filmmakers not sought to steal some of their best action scenes straight out of other movies, “Skyscraper” would be a much better picture, but as it stands, while it presents a few tense moments, sadly, that’s all it has to offer.
Available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD & On Demand October 9th
