‘Rampage’ releases The Rock and monster beasts
If Annihilation is the eggs Benedict of gene-splicing sci-fi film fare, Rampage is the huge bowl of Froot Loops.
The audaciously over-the-top adventure ( ★★g☆ rated PG-13; in theaters nationwide Friday) wrecks Chicago but isn’t a total disaster. And for that, director Brad Peyton ( San Andreas) can thank his massive stars: muscular action-movie god Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and a mutated, monstrous trio that includes an albino gorilla, a wolf with (no joke) bat wings, and a mammoth toothy crocodile with rhino-like horns. While surprisingly dark and a smidgen too earnest at times, Rampage wraps silly spectacle around its emotional core: a bromance between man and beast.
Davis Okoye (Johnson) is a primatologist who runs the ape habitat at the San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary and a guy who’s the definition of an “animal person,” spurning flirty advances from a colleague to hang out at home with his dogs. His best friend, though, is the gorilla George (played via motion capture by Jason Liles), whom Davis saved from poachers when he was little. They communicate through sign language and share inside jokes, though Davis knows something’s very wrong with his buddy when George ends up in the grizzly bear enclosure after a violent outburst and inexplicably starts growing. And growing. And growing.
Davis learns George has been exposed to one of three gas-filled canisters from a genetic-editing experiment gone wrong, and when the gorilla gets rowdy in the parking lot, the incident brings Davis an ally in disgraced scientist Dr. Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris) and a potential obstacle in enigmatic government agent Harvey Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). George escapes from federal custody and heads to the Windy City, which also is in the travel plans for a 50-foot-tall snarling Colorado wolf named Ralph and gigantic reptile from the Florida Everglades called Lizzie.
Rampage is based on the 1980s arcade favorite, and while video-game adaptations are usually trash, this one at least is completely faithful, with huge critters climbing, stomping and using a big city as their own personal American Ninja Warrior course.
Per usual, Johnson is the key cog of a movie built for his physical presence, but it’s the relationship between Davis and George that fuels the plot, even when everything around them gets convoluted and haphazard. Aside from Johnson, the humans are a mixed bag: Malin Åkerman and Jake Lacy play the cartoon villains, a pair of corporate siblings whose company is responsible for the genetic shenanigans, but Morgan adds macho moxie as Russell, who wears an outsize belt buckle and country twang with equal flair.
You come to Rampage looking for one thing — Johnson tussling with ginormous animals that would kill most mere mortals — and it delivers in that vein: George shot-puts a tank, Lizzie eats an airplane, and Davis naturally knows how to pilot a crippled helicopter off a skyscraper’s roof before it crumbles to smithereens.
Lessons aren’t usually prevalent in these kinds of movies, but this comes with one to grow on: Be kind to animals or The Rock will smack you.