Is it possible to get Rock fatigue? Can one’s enthusiasm for Dwayne ever wane? How much you enjoy Skyscraper — the one-time Brahma Bull’s fifth movie since spring last year (on top of another series of Ballers, no less) — will depend largely on your answer to that question. Rawson Marshall Thurber’s Die Hard/Towering Inferno cut-and-shut tests how much you can allow Johnson’s eyebrow flexes and pugilistic flair to obscure the physics-defying, plot-hole-punched preposterousness of pretty much everything else.
Thurber’s speciality is comedy — primarily of the physical kind, as shown by Dodgeball and previous Johnson collaboration Central Intelligence — but here he’s written and directed an action-thriller played straighter than, well, a skyscraper. (Although its ugly, titular edifice, The Pearl, looks more like an eel chewing a tennis ball.) It is not a mode that fits him well, or his leading man for that matter.
We really are back on stodgy San Andreas territory with this one
The film is light on zingers and heavy on ersatz emotionality, primarily expressed through a Taken-ish ‘Daddy’s gotta save his little girl’ intensity once Johnson’s small-time security whizz is back in the terrorist-flamed super-building of the title, via that ludicrous, trailer-heralded crane jump. The closest the script comes to self-awareness is a moment when Johnson prepares to climb the tower’s smooth glass exterior with duct tape wrapped around his mitts and shoe tips, and says to himself, “This is stupid”.
We’re supposed to buy Johnson as a damaged everyman – a past mishap cost Sawyer a leg as well as his in-the-field self-confidence – yet we also have to swallow CG-reliant set-pieces that imbue him with superhuman capabilities, as well as a nonsensical, overegged plot which boils down to a tiff over a memory stick. For all his charm, Johnson just can’t pull it off, though it’s not like Thurber bothered to craft him any helpful character-building breathers; it’s just a kick-bollock scramble from action sequence to action sequence.
Neve Campbell is a welcome presence as his wife Sarah, but aside from a few token scraps (she’s an ex-combat medic) is given little to do but follow her husband’s hurried instructions and argue with the local cops. And there’s no worthy nemesis on show, either; Danish actor Roland Møller merely stalks around like a surly alpha-henchman in desperate need of a boss.
Ultimately, Skyscraper lacks the knowing daftness of Rampage, the frantic self-parody of Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle and the balls-out brawn of the last Fast And Furious. We really are back on stodgy San Andreas territory with this one. It’s still hard to imagine ever truly getting fed up with Johnson’s relentless action-adventure antics, but if he signs up for Skyscraper 2: The Next Story, we might just have to call it a day.
