Reminiscent of those earlier, more patient action movies of yore than today’s hyper-kinetic, constant sugar-rush blockbusters, writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber ( Central Intelligence) takes his time building up not only the digitized skyscraper but the narrative momentum. So it is up for all involved to turn this imitation into an at least entertaining one, and on that front Skyscraper mostly hits the mark.
#Film dwayne johnson skyscraper movie#
Skyscraper is a movie where all of the plot points, betrayals, losses, and victories are telegraphed by virtue of being imitative storytelling.
With Sarah and her two adorable twin children (McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell) trapped inside, stranded by the fire from either reaching the ground floor or Ji’s penthouse at the top, all hope seems lost.Īlas for Møller’s team though, they didn’t account for one variable: those are the Rock’s Will Sawyer’s loved ones in there, and he’ll put their towering inferno into a headlock before he lets it consume the fam. Unfortunately, that is also the floor where industrial saboteurs, led by a snarling and perfunctory Roland Møller, begin setting the building ablaze while nameless henchwoman (Hannah Quinlivan) hijacks the structure’s security systems from the outside. Nowadays, they live an idyllic existence with their children as the only family in the skyscraper, resting peacefully on the 96th floor. However, before tourists or terrorists alike can enjoy that observation deck, Ji needs to have the skyscraper’s state of the art security systems signed off on by an inspector named Will Sawyer (Johnson), a loving family man who met his wife, military surgeon Sarah (Neve Campbell), after losing his leg in the line of duty. Ji (Chin Han) has spent billions to build this paradise, which is powered by two wind turbines near the top, just underneath his own personal penthouse suite and an observation deck complete with digital cameras that create a funhouse mirror effect for no discernable reason other than it’d be an awesome way to stage a climactic shootout. Like a double-helixed version of the new World Trade Center in Manhattan, this fictional building is a 220-floor behemoth in downtown Hong Kong called “the Pearl,” and apple of rich man Zhao Long Ji’s eye. Set in a fictional imagining of what the next tallest building in the world might look like, the eponymous Skyscraper is a shiny, reflective city on a manmade hill. As a cheeky and proudly dim actioner that features a one-legged Dwayne Johnson jumping from a crane into a burning skyscraper some hundred feet away, the movie is gloriously kitsch, and with just enough grace to stick its wobbly and delightfully derivative landing. It’s not as good as any of those movies, obviously, but it doesn’t have to be. This is unabashedly unoriginal, and it borrows from much better films that also include GoldenEye, The Dark Knight, and even Orson Welles’ noir classic, Lady from Shanghai. Indeed, there is not a twist or turn, or even action set-piece that dares risk surprising you in Dwayne Johnson’s latest high-concept-one that is so high it literally touches the clouds. So it is no surprise someone eventually just said “what about Die Hard in a Skyscraper? But, you know, on fire this time?” Hence we have the much belated yet mostly welcome Skyscraper, or “Die Hard in the Towering Inferno… and with the Rock!” Back in the ‘90s, it was more or less a cottage industry with “Die Hard on a Mountain” ( Cliffhanger), “Die Hard on a Bus” ( Speed), “Die Hard on a Plane” ( Con Air), and “Die Hard on a Plane Again” ( Air Force One), among others.
Attempting remakes of Die Hard is nothing new.
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