Rampage Review

I heard word of a certain superhero movie opening last night that one or two of my friends are looking forward to. But you didn't really want to hear my thoughts on that, did you? Thus it makes perfect sense for me to now release my long-waited review of another superhero film in its own rfight from earlier this month, that of Dwayne Johnson saving Chicago from three mega-sized, blood-thirsty animals trying to destroy that city. Truth be told, I do have reasons for not seeing this one right away when it was released two weekends ago, despite me being a lot more excited for it than I probably should've been. But those reasons aren't important. I finally saw it this past Tuesday and I am getting my review out now so that my mind can be completely clear before going into "Avengers: Infinity War" right after posting. Thus if you're wondering and were wanting me to be honest, I did not see "Infinity War" last night because of the NFL Draft. But I'm sure I'll have a lot to say about it after seeing it in a bit, so you'll just have to be patient there. For now it's time to discuss giant monsters attacking Chicago and Dwayne Johnson trying to save them. This coming from the director of "San Andreas," a fellow guilty pleasure movie for me starring Dwayne Johnson, that time fighting an earthquake.

"Rampage" is based on an 80's arcade game, thus categorizing this as another attempt at a video game movie, a genre of film that really hasn't worked out too much. Either Hollywood has had an extremely atrocious run of horrible luck, or video games simply don't translate that well to the big screen. Personally I think it's a combination of the two. Sure, we should let video games be video games and movies be movies, but certain movies like "Assassin's Creed" and "Warcraft" SHOULD'VE worked out cinematically, but whoever was in charge of those projects simply showed a whole ton of incompetence in how to make a good film. There's plenty of other examples of that, but those are the two fairly recent examples that come to mind. I do feel like Hollywood should just move on from this and stop trying to make it work, but since they're not going to give up, we'll just have to take it one movie at a time. And quite frankly, 2018 hasn't been a bad year for video game movies thus far as "Tomb Raider" and now "Rampage" have been decently enjoyable films, as long as you know what you're getting into going in. Sure, neither of them are masterpieces, so don't expect that going in. But both films are the sort of movie where you can turn off your brain and enjoy.

The original premise for the "Rampage" arcade game was quite simple. You as the user control one of the three giant animals and you're goal is to destroy the city before the government comes in and stops you. That's it. No, I haven't actually ever played it, or even heard about it before this movie was announced, but I read up about the game and talked to friends who have played it. It seems like a rather enjoyable game that's good for killing time if you have nothing else to do. So how does this translate into a 107-minute long movie when there's hardly enough content to work with? That's an excellent question. One that the filmmakers didn't seem capable of cracking. They came up with about 20 minutes of quality film with the animals attacking the city while Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, the government and others stormed into stop them, giving us a fantastic finale. But it was rather obvious that they had no idea how to properly set this up as the final product showed signs of them completely giving up on doing something that was actually worthwhile to start things off. Either they wrote a quick first draft of the screenplay and went with it without reading through it a second time or were presented with a ton of ideas that were all bad, so they settled on one of them.

That's what it felt like, anyways. Thus I have to make things abundantly clear that this is a really bad movie. There's no mincing words there or trying to talk myself out of it. This is a bad movie. We'll get into more of why I am giving it a pass anyways, but let me tell you why this is bad. This is a movie based on a very simple arcade game. They could've made the premise of the movie simple, but this is anything but simple, so allow me to give you the cliff notes version of this setup. In the universe of this movie, a certain corporation back in the 1990's came up with some sort of genetic editing wherein they were able to combine genetics from several different animals to come up with a sort of serum to create super animals, but the government decided to ban it for good reasons, so they decided to take their experiments into space where in the present day we have a certain ship where most on board have been killed by a giant, mutated rat. The lone survivor scrambles to escape from this rat and successfully does so with three canisters of this serum, but her escape pod blows up in the atmosphere, sending the canisters, which are powerful enough to survive the atmosphere, shooting to earth like asteroids, where they land and end up infecting a gorilla, crocodile and wolf.

That seems like an unnecessarily complex way to set up this idea of three giant animals. I suppose the filmmakers felt they needed to come up with some sort of explanation to why the animals are giant and why they are attacking Chicago when in reality this movie would've been better with no explanation. If you paid money to see three giant animals attack a city, is it really going to be a huge dealbreaker if there's no explanation as to why this is happening? I don't think so. But speaking of unnecessarily complex, that explanation that I just gave you us just the beginning. Crammed into the first two-thirds of this movie are so many different subplots that becoming extremely distracting and annoying. I didn't care about any of it. I just wanted to see Dwayne Johnson fighting giant animals. But the movie tried to make me care about all these other characters and subplots and I just didn't buy the. The worst of which were the two villains of the movie, the brother and sister duo of this company who were responsible for the creation of the serum and thus came up with a plan to attract all three of them to where they were in Chicago so they could do something with them. What were their motivations? I don't know. What was their end goal and why? I also don't know. 

There was some really bad writing when it came to those two, yet they were the focus of a good portion of the movie. On top of the really bad writing, the acting from both of them were quite cringe-worthy. And speaking of cringe-worthy, we also had the government subplot. The lead dude of whatever branch of military this was that were on a mission to stop the creatures did a great job with his acting, but there was so much stupidity in what they were trying to do. They tried over and over to use military forces to stop them, but it wasn't working. Despite that, they kept going with the attack instead of trying to come up with a plan that would actually work. A certain plan they may have worked was to recruit Dwayne Johnson and his new girlfriend Naomie Harris. Dwayne Johnson being an animal expert who saved and raised the now giant albino gorilla and Naomie Harris who worked on this genetic editing stuff before getting fired for reasons I quickly forgot after the movie tried to explain. But no, instead of the government recruiting these two to help them, which is where I thought this was going, the government is out to get them. So Dwayne Johnson and Naomie Harris are flying solo in avoiding the government and saving Chicago.

There were flashes in the first two-thirds of the movie of awesomeness. Those flashes came when we actually focused on these three animals in their various parts of the country getting infected and fighting off whatever was in their way. And there was a good relationship with Dwayne Johnson and his gorilla that I bought into. Speaking of Dwayne Johnson, both him and Naomie Harris gave it their all in this movie, making every sequence with them enjoyable enough. But there were just too many subplots and too many annoying characters that bogged this experience down. However, if you are willing to wade through all of that, the movie does reward you by finally becoming the movie you thought you were getting yourself into when it started. The three giant animals converge into Chicago, Dwayne Johnson and Naomie Harris successfully avoid all the obstacles, and the military is in full out attack mode. From there on, the movie is a blast. And by that, I mean it's "Sharknado" levels of fantastic. The movie owns up to its ridiculous premise and has a lot of fun with incredibly stupid silliness that often had me rolling over in my chair in laughter and enjoyment. There's a lot of specifics that I want to mention, but I suppose I'll keep this review spoiler free.

A recommendation for this movie is fairly easy, I feel. This is probably a movie that should've debuted on the Syfy Channel instead of Warner Bros. spending over $100 million on putting it in theaters. There's a lot of sequences that are flat out cringe worthy and they take up a majority of the first two acts of the film. And sometimes the CGI is Syfy quality as well given that there were moments where it looked like Dwayne Johnson in front of a green screen or fighting with CGI animals that were put into the shot after the fact. Granted, that's what happens in every monster movie. But a monster movie like this needs to convince me that the monsters are actually there, which this movie only did sometimes, which is another comparison to Syfy movies. However, the recommendation is this. If you like dumb Syfy movies like "Sharknado," then I think there's potential that you might enjoy this quite a bit. If you haven't seen it in theaters yet, I wouldn't bother. Instead, I would recommend waiting till this comes to DVD or Netflix because then you have the power to fast forward and quickly get to the moments of the movie that really matter. A grade for this is tricky since I admit that it is a bad movie. But since the finale really entertained me, I'm going 7/10 for "Rampage."