‘Rampage’ is big, dumb fun

Dwayne Johnson has become a genre unto himself. Outfit the hulking former WWE star in a pair of cargo pants and a snug henley tee, and throw him into any extreme situation — jungle-based video game, diesel-fueled car stuntery, beach crimes, fighting an earthquake, starring across Kevin Hart — and it just works. So pairing Johnson with a giant albi no gorilla in the vid eo game adaptation “Rampage” feels right. The tagline reads “big meets bigger,” and that’s about all you need to know. Johnson, who usually dwarfs his co-stars, this time gets to feel small. It’s big, all right — big, dumb fun.

Directed by Brad Peyton, who has wreaked cinematic havoc around Johnson in “San Andreas” and “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” “Rampage” expands the narrative of the retro game, which involved a giant gorilla, wolf and crocodile crunching skyscrapers into dust. In this iteration, writers Ryan Engle, Carlton Cuse, Ryan J. Condal and Adam Sztykiel have anthropomorphized the gorilla, who is now named George (played by motion-capture actor Jason Liles), the best friend of Davis Okoye ( Johnson), a primatologist with a background in the Army Spe- cial Forces and anti-poaching activism, naturally. He runs the wildlife sanctuary in San Diego, where George makes his home.

When a spacecraft carrying research samples from a

shady corporate gene-editing experiment explodes in the atmosphere scattering its tainted shrapnel across the U.S., George, a wolf and a crocodile are infected with the stuff. It causes them to grow to an enormous size and act out aggressively.

Hoping to save his friend, Davis links up with a disgraced genetic scientist, Kate (Naomie Harris), and barges right into the middle of the operation to take down these monsters that are threatening to level Chi- cago, Godzilla-style.

The script smashes through rapid-fire charac- ter introductions, each big- ger and broader than the last. But it’s Jeffrey Dean Mor- gan, in fine fettle, who does as much structural damage as the monsters do, chew- ing the scenery as a swaggering cowboy of a government agent, replete with pearlhandled pistol on his hip. He relishes every sweet, honey- accented line delivery, but he too, is even upstaged, by the SuperCroc, who makes possibly the most memorable entrance of the year. All these characters make for a movie that never slows down, but among all the mayhem, Johnson is completely lost. He doesn’t get a chance to truly show his comedy chops or acting skill, the in fact, least and dwarfed developed. his character by George, He is, is and every other hammy performance on screen. As a stupefyingly silly throwback monster movie, “Rampage” romps, but as a Johnson vehicle, sadly, it flops.

CONTRIBUTED BY WARNER BROS. PICTURES Dwayne Johnson (left) as Davis Okoye and Jason Liles as George in “Rampage.”