Familiar die-scraper
ADIRECTOR and writer of comedy films remade Die Hard with camp action hero extraordinaire Dwayne Johnson in the lead role, set the whole thing in a ludicrously tall CGI building, and gave the hero a prosthetic leg just to mix things up a bit.
If you think that sounds over the top and completely silly, you’d be absolutely right — but the movie in question, Skyscraper, is quite a lot of fun, despite is derivative structure and bonkers action sequences.
Johnson plays Will Sawyer, a former FBI hostage rescue expert who now works as a security consultant for high-flying corporate clients.
His latest client is Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han), a Hong Kong businessman who has recently completed construction of the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Pearl. Sawyer even brings his wife and kids along to stay in the residential section of the tower while he completes his official duties. But a group of heavily armed thugs infiltrates the building, disabling the fire sprinklers and setting a fire halfway up the tower, which rapidly consumes the top half of the building, trapping Sawyer’s family, and Zhao, inside.
All together now: Sawyer must fight his way up the skyscraper to rescue his family, save Zhao and stop the bad guys from achieving whatever goal it is they’re trying to achieve.
Yep, pretty formulaic. For all the overly contrived machinations of the plot, everything is really only a thin pretext to make certain things happen in the movie and enable particular action setpieces, while the actual plot is just a handful of dot-points.
In fact, Skyscraper is so monumentally predictable that I was successfully able to predict nearly every major plot point (and even the ending) within the opening 30 minutes. There is some heavyhanded foreshadowing going on here, and everything is laid out so plainly that it is quite easy to piece together who will die (and how), which parts of the building have been designed solely for an action sequence, and how the major obstacles will be overcome long before they even arise.
Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber, you see, is primarily known for his comedy work: Dodgeball, Central Intelligence and We’re the Millers. He has even worked previously with Dwayne Johnson on action comedy Central Intelligence, but this is his first straight action movie, which is probably why it adheres so strictly to the age-old formula.
And it really is played dead straight. We’ve come to expect a certain self-aware comedic quality from Johnson’s roles, but his character in Skyscraper is not this kind of camp silliness. And while parts of Skyscraper are hilariously over the top, the whole thing is played straight as an arrow. It still has its funny moments but somehow they never seem to be laughs at the movie’s expense. As silly as it is — and it KNOWS it is silly — we are still invited to play along, suspend disbelief and just enjoy ourselves. And it really is quite a lot of fun.
The opening scene — the botched rescue operation that causes Sawyer to resign from the FBI — is a bit hard to watch, though. Considering the lightweight kind of movie this is, it is perhaps a bit too heavy and tragic. But it is called back to later on, which at least makes it serve its purpose.
An odd stylistic choice is the repeated cutaways to the crowd of onlookers watching the action unfold from the streets below, bot by looking up to the tower and on a series of conveniently located giant video screens.
There are frequent shots of the crowd gasping and cheering and so forth as they watch Sawyer’s assault on the tower, and these scenes are openly played for laughs, lightening the mood at points of high tension. While this tactic should probably have been annoying, it actually kinda works here.
This is a formula-written movie with a title that is also its sole premise (Action Movie in a Skyscraper), and these crowd shots serve to remind you that you are also just a spectator in the whole thing, gasping and cheering and cringing along with the on-screen mob. It is a kind of signal that it is OK to just give in to the melodrama of the whole thing and enjoy yourself. Think of it as the action movie equivalent of canned laughter.
The movie also creates a very authentic feeling of vertigo with a number of highaltitude sequences that made my stomach churn. I’m glad I didn’t see it in 3D.
Skyscraper is unapologetically derivative. Some promotional art intentionally mimics that of Die Hard, much of the imagery is directly evocative of Towering Inferno, and there are even traces of the Sherlock Holmes story A Scandal in Bohemia — if you don’t know it, look it up after seeing the movie. And I’m pretty sure the space signal noise from Contact is the same sound effect used for the spinning turbines in Skyscraper.
Yet despite the thin story, idiotic stunts, and evil plot that is far too elaborate for the goal is it chasing, Skyscraper is quite a fun diversion.
It is almost immediately forgettable, but that’s OK.