Skyscraper ** (2018, Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell, Roland Møller, Pablo Schreiber, Chin Han, Noah Taylor) – Movie Review

Here, hang on a minute, Dwayne, the preposterous Skyscraper needs a reality check. It is a bit of a tall story that takes a lot of swallowing.

The preposterous Skyscraper needs a reality check. Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber’s Skyscraper is a mediocre Seventies-style disaster movie, spiced up with ludicrous CGI and absurd action so it loses all touch with reality. It is a bit of a tall story that takes a lot of swallowing.

Dwayne Johnson is its main ace card as Will Sawyer, a former FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader and US war veteran, who has found an unexpected new career in assessing security for skyscrapers. In Hong Kong they have built the tallest, snazziest building in the world, and it’s Will’s latest job to assess its safety. It’s safe, he says, so they can go ahead and open it all up.

The Chinese owner (Chin Han) has a penthouse on top, and also a McGuffin, a memory stick with criminals’ bank secrets on, the same criminals who now set the building’s 16th floor alight, and find Will’s tablet, get through its face recognition code, and de-activate the building’s entire elaborate safety system. So the whole building is suddenly ablaze, and, for some really obscure reason connected with his devious brother Ben (Pablo Schreiber), Will is been framed for arson on the grandest scale, and is now wanted man. With such a tall building, that is grand arsony, I suppose.

However, for some really obscure reason, Will’s feisty wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) and irritating kids (well at any rate, Will loves them, we know that because he keeps saying so: ‘Daddy loves you!’) are unexpectedly still in a suite in the building – above the fire line – and bump into the very foreign-seeming, and therefore dodgy-seeming – criminals, who happen to be carrying the gear that she somehow knows belong to a parachute company.

Will is one hunk of a man, but a real cheesy daddy and hubby. He keeps telling Sarah he loves her, too: ‘I love you!’ He is a new real man. Feminists might like him, script-writers certainly must – how difficult is it to write lines like ‘Daddy loves you!’ and ‘I love you!’? Audiences might like him less, seeking, well just better dialogue.

Yes Ma and kids are trapped inside the building, so Will has the evade the Hong King cops, go on the run, somehow break into the burning skyscraper, rescue his family above the fire line, deal with the bad guys and the owner, clear his name, and get the hell out of Dodge himself. Now the problem here is credibility. In the pre-credits sequence, we find that Will has lots a leg, so nothing that he tries to do after that – that is the entire body of the film is credible. Thurber adds insult to Will’s injury by making him do the most ridiculous things that it is easy to quickly lose patience.

As with the Seventies-style disaster movies, such as The Towering Inferno to which this movie owes an obvious debt, it is possible to have a sneaking liking for the movie’s sheer cheek and bravado. But that is not enough, even with the continuingly admirable Johnson as hero. Campbell has her moments too as Sarah, and Roland Møller is quite fun as the leering Scandinavian villain Kores Botha. In a career-worst performance, a possible Razzie Worst Supporting Actor nominee, Noah Taylor is quite awful as the all-too-English insurance bloke, Mr Pierce. It is thrilling to know that his next role is Adolf Hitler.

It hardly helps that the pacing is wrong. The film takes a long time to get started, then rushes too fast, packs in far too many incidents in a shortish running time, further damaging credibility, then packs up too suddenly with a slack and lazy ending. But even so the 102 minutes start getting draggy and feel over-long – and it should be an epic! It looks a bit cramped and made on a budget, but actually it cost a stonking $125 million.

Yes it’s not just another remake, reboot, prequel or sequel, but, with so much borrowing of ideas from elsewhere (even the mirror sequence from The Lady from Shanghai), it feels like a remake, so that is just as bad. The Towering Inferno sustains for two and three quarter hours without getting too draggy but Skyscraper scrapes to fill 102 minutes.

However, it is a movie for grown-ups, and I did prefer it to Johnson’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. So, as a time-passer, thanks for that.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com