The Rock’s Rampage goes big on action
Movie has some amusing and engaging moments, but it’s far from Rock solid
Remember that movie San Andreas, where a helicopter pilot played by Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson saves people from an earthquake? Rampage is that movie. Mind you, it’s also Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, where a khaki-clad Johnson fights video-game animals. And it’s Pacific Rim without the giant robots. And Life, the 2017 thriller about rapidly evolving alien life on a space station.
With that kind of buffet menu, you’d expect Rampage to be amusing and engaging for at least some of the time. And it is! It’s flabby in the middle third and a final showdown in the streets of Chicago goes on for about 10 minutes longer than anyone without a demolition fetish
would desire. But Johnson’s charm and some decent supporting work from Naomie Harris and Jeffrey Dean Morgan see us through. In a tense opening I had expected to star Sandra Bullock, a genetic experiment goes awry in space, and the glowy green gas that generates gargantuanism in gorillas, gators and anything else it touches returns to Earth in canister form, landing in Wyoming wolf country, the Florida Everglades and the San Diego Zoo. Hey, it could have been worse: Imagine if they’d hit a marshmallow factory, a B.C. pot farm or Skull Island!
The San Diego strike causes an already massive gorilla named George to get even bigger. George is played in motion capture by Jason Liles — who, I’m sorry, is no Andy Serkis. His handler is Davis (Johnson), that classic combination of ex-marine, conservationist and primatologist. He’s also George’s best friend, so when the ape goes ape and escapes, Davis follows, hoping to cure the gorilla or at least calm him down.
Davis has a posse of zoologists in the early going, but the screenplay, by a quartet that includes San Andreas scribe Carlton Cuse, soon loses sight of them in the mayhem. For most of the story, Davis’s chief sidekick is geneticist Kate Caldwell (Harris), who used to work for the evil corporation that created the growth serum. He also runs into Morgan, having a ball playing a government agent from the DOE (Department of Exposition).
There’s less charisma to be found from Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy as the sister-brother team running Energyne, which I believe is a subsidiary of Cyberdyne Systems. She mostly barks orders and stares people down — the camera loves her eyes — while he simpers and whines. Neither seems to have a long-term plan for Project Rampage, but since when did evil need a reason?
The movie is ever-so-loosely based on a 1986 arcade game, in which players controlled giant monsters that had to destroy a city.
That’s pretty much the task director Brad Peyton set for himself, and he manages it well enough, although some of the action in downtown Chicago had the look of a video game itself. This is what happens when you try to make a $150-million movie for a mere $120 million.
Johnson and Harris have some nice chemistry, both separately and in tandem, which is ultimately what makes Rampage the mildly enjoyable time-waster that it is. Certainly the dialogue does them no favours. At one point, Davis learns what two of the beasts are up to and muses: “Two different species making a co-ordinated long-distance journey — that just doesn’t happen!” Stop me if I’m wrong, but I think he just described the plot of Disney’s The Incredible Journey.