Skyscraper
When I saw this listed on the forthcoming screenings list, I intentionally put it on my calendar as Skyscraper!, as in something so big, awkward, and clumsy they would require the extra punctuation as a further selling point.
What I hadn’t taken into account was that this version of Die Harder-er would take as gospel so much from the original Bruce Willis film that made it so surprisingly effective as an action flick. The baddies might not ever have figured out a way to kill John McClane, but Hollywood producers are far more formidable beasts: Rather than continue the series with McClane hobbling down a hallway in a walker, they just replaced him outright and took many of the elements from the DH
collection as their own.
As has been well chronicled over the years (and just recently as we have hit the 30 year anniversary mark), Die Hard worked in large part because of how it treated its hero less like one of Arnold’s impervious killing machines (in Commando alone, Schwarzenegger wiped out more than 100 dudes on his own), and more like a quasi-realistic human being, with various frailties, emotional issues with his ex-wife, famously bleeding bare feet, and a once-white muscle shirt that comes out at the end a deep shade of mottled olive.
Here, writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber saddles his hero, Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson), with numerous weaknesses, emotional and physical — in an earlier life as an FBI agent with hostage rescue, he made a crucial mistake which ultimately cost him one of his legs, and much of his confidence — but none more so than the fact that he truly seems to adore his wife, Sarah (Neve Campbell), and kids (McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell).
He’s in Hong Kong with his family on an important business trip: Ben (Pablo Schreiber) his former FBI partner, also wounded in the blast that took Will’s leg, has recommended Will’s tiny security assessment service to his boss, Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han), a multibillionaire who just built the Pearl, the world’s tallest and most techno-advanced building in downtown Hong Kong.
Impressed with his work, Zhao grants special administrative access to Will on an iPad-like device, so he can control all 3,500 feet of the building’s security controls and fire prevention technology. Naturally, this device is snatched out of Will’s hands a short while later by skilled thieves, and the security measures all disabled long enough for a ruthless syndicate enforcer (Roland Moller), to set fire to the building’s 96th floor, with Will’s wife and kids staying by themselves just a few floors up. With cops chasing him, and various goons trying to gun him down, Will has to somehow return to the high-high-high rise, now cordoned off by Hong Kong police, get to his family and figure out a way he can get them down, past the flame-engulfed floors, to safety.
What happens next involves (in rough chronological order) Will being stabbed, shot at, beaten down, scaling some outside scaffolding about 100 floors high faster than a group of cops can take a high-speed elevator there, hanging off a girder at least 2000+ feet up with a single finger hold multiple times, completing about a 25-foot broad jump off of one working leg from a runway of construction grating about 30 feet long, beaten some more, shot at countless more times, blackmailed, and
many other physics-tortured stunts before he’s through.
As little of the physical action makes much actual sense, you would imagine the film would have the same kind of lazy, shaggy dog quality that so many of Johnson’s previous big action flicks have acquiesced to (San Andreas, perhaps the most shining example), but say what you might about his shameless pilfering, Thurber studied Die Hard extensively enough to know giving us a hero filled with vulnerabilities requires a more nuanced approach to character. Johnson tones his normal bravado way down, his salt-and-pepper beard a testimony to his age, his hobbled run indicative of the leg he has lost, and more importantly, his commanding swag reigned from raging waterfall to tiny trickle. To the aptly named Will, it is less than a foregone conclusion that he’ll be able to meet every challenge, all he knows is he has no choice but to take every risk in order to protect his family.
Time and again he’s forced to improvise his weaponry and tactics. He’s not out for revenge or to clear his name, or to beat the bad guys into submission with his fists and fast quips, he’s there for one reason alone, and never let’s us forget he’s a daddy first, and a bringer of justice a distant second.
To that end as well, the film at least allows his wife, a former naval surgeon, to have a few moments of her own under the action-spotlight glare. The pair prove to be more of a formidable team together than alone, which is at least some sort of progress.
Unlike so many other films about fathers pushed to the breaking point when their families are threatened, Sawyer actually seems to really care about his wife and kids, less out of ego than something resembling genuine affection. It is this unexpected bout with humanity that gives the film at least some sort of emotional grounding, such that the vastly more ridiculous stunts and set-pieces, while exceedingly ludicrous, don’t weigh the film down entirely with their CGI silliness.
It ain’t much, to be sure, but the film feels somewhat better cared for than a lot of other summer dreck hitting the screens in voluminous waves, week after week. It’s not enough to earn any sort of real recommendation, but I can at least safely remove the snarky exclamation point and replace it with a more subdued period.