YOU’VE SEEN KING KONG . . . NOW MEET KING CORN!
THRee gigantic mutated animals against Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is not a fair fight, but director Brad Peyton spins it out for nearly two hours in Rampage, a film twice as preposterous as it is exhilarating, yet twice as exhilarating as any other movie you can think of in which a gorilla, a wolf and an alligator-armadillo hybrid attempt to flatten downtown Chicago.
Scalp gleaming and muscles bulging, and sometimes the other way round, Johnson bestrides Rampage like a colossus.
That there are other creatures even more colossal is a mere detail that we can expect The Rock to flick away as he would a couple of heavily-armed military policemen.
Yet he has become, these past few years, more than simply a prime cut of American beefcake. He has become a hybrid himself. In virtually every movie in which he stars, he is half Arnold Schwarzenegger and half Albert Schweitzer, a man with quadriceps straining inside his trousers and compassion bursting from his heart.
Rampage derives from the video game of the same name, ten words to strike fear into any prospective cinema audience. But then again, the same was true of last year’s Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, which also featured Johnson, and was, unexpectedly, huge fun.
Here, he plays Davis Okoye, a former Special Forces soldier who, in that standard step up the career ladder, has become a leading primatologist.
He works in a San Diego wildlife park where he communes with the animals like Rex Harrison in Doctor Dolittle, saving his special relationship for an albino silverback gorilla called George. He has taught George sign language and the pair of them get on like a spaceship on fire.
That is not an idly-chosen image, by the way. At the beginning of the movie there really is a spaceship on fire, which, after breaking up in a huge explosion, pings some dangerous pathogens towards earth. If you’re not entirely sure what a dangerous pathogen is, it really doesn’t matter. Total lack of comprehension is no obstacle to enjoying Rampage.
Indeed, we are soon introduced to a geneticist called Dr Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris), who very urgently says of something or other: ‘Please tell me you had that tested for residual particulates’.
This is proof positive that the screenwriters are trying to blind us with dodgy science in the hope that we won’t look beyond it to the
fatuity of the plot. Anyway, by this stage, the pathogens have infected George and a few other unfortunate animals in North America, with the result that they keep getting bigger and angrier.
Sweet-natured George runs amok, and has to be contained by the military. A slick-talking government agent called Russell (played with a generous slice of Southern ham by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) turns up to order that George be tranquilised, trussed and loaded onto a cargo plane.
Now, you don’t need to have seen dozens of daft genetic-mutation movies to know there will be a pair of one-dimensional villains at the root of all this; you only need to have seen a few episodes of the HannaBarbera cartoon Wacky Races.
Our Dastardly and Muttley are Claire Wyden (Malin Akerman) and her dim-witted brother Brett (Jake Lacy), who, from their Chicago skyscraper, run a sinister corporation trying to weaponise DNA and make trillions.
Claire, who is so evil that she habitually talks and feeds a rat at the same time, is also bright enough to realise the rampaging mutants need to be tempted back to Chicago so she can harvest their genes.
This she does by turning on a high-frequency transmitter, summoning George, who not altogether surprisingly has freed himself from his mile-high shackles and gone ape on the plane. He starts hotfooting it to the Windy City with his new friend, the wolf.
Luckily, Davis and Dr Kate are still in the game, looking for an antidote and earnestly saying things to each other like: ‘This could be our only way to stop George and the wolf before they level Chicago.’
There are some cherishingly corny lines of dialogue in this film, several of them almost meriting a round of applause. The pick of them comes from Russell, explaining which government agency he belongs to. ‘When science ***** the bed, I’m the guy they call to change the sheets,’ he says. An instant classic, to rank with anything in Casablanca.
NeAR the end, however, another golden oldie springs more readily to mind, with conspicuous visual references to the original 1933 King Kong and several of its remakes.
By now, George and the wolf have been joined by the alligatorarmadillo, which has risen terrifyingly from the Chicago River, having at first been detected underneath the water by military radar.
‘We don’t have any subs in the area,’ says a puzzled army colonel, as if there might normally be a batch of submarines gliding around Lake Michigan looking for trouble.
It is all monumentally silly, but nevertheless done with tremendous verve and absolutely terrific special effects, so here’s my tip: if you’re in the habit of munching your way through popcorn flicks, then make sure you go into Rampage with the biggest bucket available.
It might be the popcorniest entertainment you’ll see all year.