Action movie cliches topple ‘Skyscraper’
Bigger is not always better, America. Impressively monikered writerdirector Rawson Marshall Thurber (“We’re the Millers”) has lifted almost every element from John McTiernan’s 1988 landmark “Die Hard” in the screenplay and direction for the Vancouvershot action movie “Skyscraper.”
Thurber has made everything bigger: the towering CGI “city in the sky” building in Kowloon Plaza, Hong Kong, with a vertical park, waterfall and turbine engines; the explosions, the fires and nick-of-time escapes.
Even the protagonist is super-sized. Instead of regular-issue New York City police officer John McClane (Bruce Willis), we get giant Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson), an exFBI operative, who loses a lower leg in an encounter with a murderous, suicidal father in opening scenes set 10 years earlier.
In the present day, loving husband and father Will is putting on his metal prosthesis the morning he applies for the job of head of security for the new building in Hong Kong. His wife, Sarah (a very good Neve Campbell), is a polylingual military surgeon. The Sawyers, who practically sing “We Are Family” have a cute pair of preteen twins, Georgia (McKenna Roberts) and Henry (Noah Cottrell), and they are all staying on the building’s 96th floor. Ruh-roh.
The high-rise, which is hideous by the way, is three times higher than the Empire State Building and called the Pearl because it has a sphere at its apex. Will gets the job and is given a tablet that controls all the systems in the building.
Soon, a bunch of heavily armed killers with Eastern European accents have set the Pearl on fire and shut down all the fire-fighting systems with the help of a gun-slinging martial arts whiz black widow (Hannah Quinlivan), who would give the Terminator nightmares.
Johnson, the hardestworking man in showbiz, has had three films in release this year, the December 2017 release “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” “Rampage” and now this. He and his agent are apparently not concerned that we will grow tired of him and his low IQ spectacles.
But “Skyscraper” is one of the lowest. A penthouse level floor that features panels that pop up and serve as digital mirrors is a lift from “Enter the Dragon.” While you tick off the copycat scenes, Will, a canned version of the allpurpose Johnson action hero, climbs a 100-plusstory crane to get above the fire level and leap into the burning building, while an appreciative Hong Kong crowd on the ground cheers him on.
Of course, the idiot local police think Will is involved in the sabotage. The wife and kids dodge explosions and bad guys. The killers shoot up a room full of technicians with machine guns while somehow not damaging a single computer screen. Hilarious. The duct tape Will refers to repeatedly and uses to staunch his bleeding is an apt metaphor for this film itself.
McTiernan and his writers created one of film’s most memorable villains in Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber. “Skyscraper” gives us a brute with a beard and a Slavic accent (Roland Moller). What’s his name? Who cares? Just shoot him.