BETWEEN THE ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
Talk about overheated storey-telling: Skyscraper elevates suspension of disbelief
Skyscraper is basically an answer to that childhood question: If you dropped a Rock from the top of the world’s tallest building, would it hurt anyone?
In the latest shenanigans involving professional saviour Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson (San Andreas, Jumanji, Rampage, etc.), his character gets to climb, dangle from and in one instance rappel down a 220-storey building, and also drive a motorcycle through heavy Hong Kong traffic after escaping a shootout with the police. Honestly, it’s like he’s trying to make Tom Cruise jealous.
The difference is that Cruise’s stunts were on the world’s tallest actual building, the 828-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai. As Will Sawyer, Johnson does him one better — sort of — by scaling the world’s tallest imaginary building, dubbed The Pearl. Imagine the Burj topped out with a couple of Nakatomi Plazas and you’ll get a sense of the scale of this thing.
The Die Hard comparison is apt, since Will is fighting not just to stop a raging inferno, but also to save his family, trapped above the fire line, and possibly rescue the building ’s owner (Chin Han) from an almost bewildering number of villains. In place of the late Alan Rickman, the Eurobaddie is Denmark’s Roland Møller.
In case you don’t believe in The Rock’s inherent goodness, writer-director Rawson Marshall
Thurber sets Will up as a hostage rescuer who loses a leg in the line of duty. Cut to 10 years later, and Will is married to ex-army surgeon Sarah (Neve Campbell) with a pair of cherubic twins. He now works as a security consultant, which is why he’s involved in the opening of The Pearl’s upper floors.
But the criminals have other plans, starting a blaze on the 96th and shutting down the fire-suppression systems to make sure it spreads. “This isn’t just a fire. It’s a plot,” says one henchman, and it’s hard to argue with that. When the conflagration reaches a massive atrium and turns into a forest fire, while Johnson’s character dangles one-handed from a broken window while trying to reach a massive wind turbine, Skyscraper becomes a literal example of suspension of disbelief.
Not that it isn’t a fun ride, especially if you need two hours of air conditioning. Taiwan’s Hannah Quinlivan plays one of the on-the-ground criminals, and has a great moment where she turns her back on a hail of bullets even as one of her underlings throws himself in their path. It’s a nifty update on the ol’ walking-away-from-anexplosion scene. And the muscly Will at one point picks up an axe that looks better suited to fighting medieval armies than mere fire.
Thurber’s script doesn’t even try for nuance — you can guarantee that any offhand remark in the first 30 minutes will reappear down the road to drive the story forward. But Johnson is fast becoming the go-to guy to sell hokey circumstances with just enough of a wink to let you know that he’s in on the joke. And before you complain that the screenplay is needlessly padded, just ask yourself — how else are they going to keep that fire burning?