Johnson battles weapons of crass destruction in film
“Rampage” is a drag. Three times during the thing, I wrote down the phrase “NO FUN,” with increasingly impatient underlines. This could be me, not the movie. Maybe I’m the one who’s no fun. But in general I like Dwayne Johnson, that smiling granite star, coupled with a tremendous amount of vehicular- or tsunami-based destruction. For all its cheese, “San Andreas” (2015), Johnson’s previous collaboration with director Brad Peyton, was pretty diverting, thanks in part to Carla Gugino and Alexandra Daddario sprinting through the disaster picture, creating the effect of “Earthquake? What earthquake? There was an earthquake?”
But “Rampage” is all pain and no gain. Its massive, “genetically edited” creatures include a 30-foot flying wolf and a very long crocodile with porcupine accessories, both purely malevolent, and in excruciating pain for large chunks of the movie. Primarily the film offers the incredible expanding silverback gorilla, George, friend and colleague of the San Diego primatologist played by Johnson. He also suffers throughout. This is a movie about suffering.
After a space lab carrying deadly experimental pathogens breaks up and crash-lands at various points on the U.S. map, the animals become infected, and mutate, and get ornery. They’re adolescents, in other words. “Mighty Joe Young” style, George starts out the adorable one, but he can’t regulate his mood swings or his growth spurt. The excellent Naomie Harris, lately in “Moonlight,” takes the nothing role of a geneticist whose former employer, the insidious biotech firm Energyne, is run by Malin Akerman (as good as she usually is, which is to say, not very) and Jake Lacy (mugging like he’s hopped up on experimental pathogens).
The Energyne headquarters is at the top of Willis Tower in Chicago. Akerman and Lacy, dastards both, control the creatures’ movements by way of bio-sonar, and when “Rampage” finally gets its ungainly patches of exposition out of the way, the destruction begins in earnest and the straightfaced orders commence.
Nobody goes to a movie like “Rampage” for the poetry, but truly this is a terrible screenplay, credited to four writers and tonally all over the place. The digital effects are solid, but there’s no pleasure in the film’s climactic three-way clash involving Johnson, Harris and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s drawling, dawdling gum’int honcho (the actor has more fun than we do); the monsters, razing and redeveloping real estate at an alarming rate.
This should be a “Hold on!” sort of movie, where the most complicated line of dialogue is simply: “Hold on!” (Johnson says it, and it’s very satisfying.) Instead, “Rampage” periodically stops dead for tedious scientific explanations. At one point, George is in pain (honestly, this should be called “The Passion of the Simian”) and waiting for lunch, while Johnson yaks on with Harris about the dangers to come.
In the original video game “Rampage,” the exposition read on screen: “Peoria experimental vitamin has ill effects.” The game was more entertaining than the movie, to say the least, which feels hastily rewritten and nervously edited. Johnson and Harris will survive it. But if it’s a hit, it’ll only encourage studios and audiences to settle for more of the same joyless, indecisive noise. Like the original gang straight out of Peoria, we’ll all suffer the ill effects.