Skyscraper Review

The world's most charismatic, lovable giant of a man is back in theaters. Once a professional wrestler, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is now one of Hollywood's most bankable stars as his list of movies he's helped power to impressive heights is quite large. Recent films in said category include "Rampage," "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," the past four "Fast and the Furious" movies, "Moana," "Central Intelligence" and "San Andreas." In fact, out of all the movies he's done in the last five years, which is quite a bit, the only real dud has been "Baywatch." Everything else almost certainly would've done a whole lot worse with anyone else in the lead role, even if the rest of the movie was the exact same. I mean, take a movie like "San Andreas." Given the reviews and the type of disaster movie it was, without Dwayne Johnson it would've probably been closer to "Geostorm" at the box office, which ended with $33 million domestically. Throw in Dwayne Johnson and suddenly it made $155 million. In fact, I'm pretty sure Dwayne Johnson would've been able to push "Geostorm" to at least twice as much if he were the lead star instead of Gerard Butler. The man has an undeniable presence as he's just a joy to watch in pretty much everything he does.

Dwayne Johnson's latest gig here with "Skyscraper" sees him climbing the world's tallest building in order to save his family who is trapped inside. This fictional building in the universe of this movie, which is called The Pearl, is 3,500 feet tall, exceeding the height of Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in today's real life world, by 783 feet as Burj Khalifa stands at 2,717 feet tall. The Pearl is also 2.8 times higher than the Empire State Building, the movie's other comparison in a brief scene. The idea of this made me wonder if we'd ever get a building that tall in real life. The answer is that it's quite possible. I say that because I was just on Wikipedia looking at the list of the current tallest buildings in the world and the current top 15 tallest buildings in the world as of this moment were all built within the last 15 years. In fact, 13 of them were built in 2010 or later. Six of them were completed this year or last year with four of those six being built in China. Taking this even further, Wikipedia has a list of 59 buildings with their source being the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats (CTBUH) and 28 of them come from China (that's 47 percent) with 21 of those having been built since 2010. So them Chinese people are quite busy building skyscrapers.

By no means am I an expert on skyscrapers. I just found all of that out right before I typed it because I was searching for the name and correct spelling of Burj Khalifa in Dubai and happened to stumble on this list, so I figured I'd share because I found it fascinating. Unsurprisingly, this movie takes place in China, Hong Kong specifically (where four of these 28 buildings are). So it's quite feasible that some Chinese developer would decide that they want to top Burj Khalifa in the near future. And that's probably the only feasible thing that this movie has in it because the entire run time is full of sheer ridiculousness that you either buy into or you don't. If you walk out of this movie thinking that was the dumbest movie you've seen in a long time, I won't blame you at all. You could list off all of your complaints to me and I would totally empathize with you. But then I would tell you I simply don't care because I had a blast with this movie. The most talked about scene is the infamous jump scene from the trailer that leaves you hanging and that scene has been memed quite a bit on the internet. In fact, I've seen multiple articles detailing all the math and physics behind that jump and if he would make it or not, yet they all make me laugh because who the fetch cares? Of course he makes the jump!

If you're one of those hardcore physics nerds that gets extremely upset every time a movie throws the laws of physics in the trash can, then you better avoid this like the plague because this movie will be your worst nightmare because that jump is far from the only thing that is completely unrealistic. Once we get into the meat of this film, this movie absolutely torches the laws of physics, then stands above them, laughing in their face as those laws writhe painfully on the ground. The movie just doesn't care and I found it as entertaining as heck. I was smiling like a giddy school boy for the whole run time. Yet you have to understand that I've become a bit of a sucker for these dumb Dwayne Johnson action flicks. I had a blast with "San Andreas" in 2015 and I also thoroughly enjoyed the finale of this year's "Rampage." All three movies have completely ridiculous premises, but Dwayne Johnson just owns it every time. He doesn't go in half-heartedly like Bruce Willis often does in all of his dumb action movies. He takes each role completely and gives 100 percent to the project. It doesn't matter if he's battling against a giant earthquake, a giant crocodile and wolf, or a terrorist organization trying to burn down a giant building. He takes his role and he owns. 

Regardless of what you think about this movie, what might go undisputed here are the visuals effects. Because it's Dwayne Johnson and, as I previously mentioned, he's quite the bankable star, Universal went big here and greenlit a budget of $125 million for "Skyscraper," so they had a lot of money to work with here and they certainly made great use of it. The design of the building itself is really neat and they had some pretty sweet rooms when they got to the very top. My favorite room was one with a whole bunch of mirrors in it. They had a lot of fun with various action sequences in that room that were pretty entertaining. There was a also a lot of scenes that gave me quite the adrenaline rush because I have a horrible fear of heights. The highest building I've been on is the Stratosphere in Vegas. I would walk up to one of those windows at the top and immediately walk away because just looking out the window was too much for me. How I ever managed to force myself to ride that roller coaster on the top of the Stratosphere is beyond me. That's probably the craziest thing I've ever done. When Dwayne Johnson was out climbing the building in this movie or doing his other various stunts, I was rather impressed by how the movie was able to replicate that adrenaline.

Now to address the elephant in the room that I've been avoiding up to this point and that is the "Die Hard" comparisons. When the trailers were released, the internet immediately cried out with said "Die Hard" comparisons because the premise of both movies are practically the same. With this, I think half the internet shouted blasphemies for this looking like a rip-off while the other half got excited, saying this could be 2018's "Die Hard." I was more neutral in terms of that as the "Die Hard" comparison didn't really effect me one way or the other. In fact, I just barely watched that movie for the very first time earlier this year after a friend gave it to me as a gift. While it's an extremely entertaining action flick, it also has a premise that I've seen a thousand times. It's a hostage movie. "Criminal Minds" does the hostage story arc practically once a season, as do most other crime shows. Perhaps the hostage premise with a husband saving his family in a giant building makes it fairly unique to "Die Hard," but I still don't mind that premise being reused as long as they do it well. I think "Skyscraper" pulled it off decently. To me it didn't seem like a blatant ripoff of anything. It just seemed like they were having a lot of fun.

Given that said hostage arc is done so often, I find myself paying very close attention to the perpetrator of said situation whenever it's brought up, paying specific attention to the motivations of the individuals. In this instance, who are these group of people that are behind this? What do they have against Dwayne Johnson, his family or any other targets of theirs? Why do they feel these specific actions are the appropriate actions to take? And this is where the movie fails miserably. But I won't tell you why because that would require spoilers. I will say that the actors who played the villains all had a fun time with their villainous roles, but the writing of their characters were pretty bad and the movie also got a bit too cute with all of the twists and turns as far as who was bad and who was good. Being more straight-forward with the villains would've been better because then you could spend at least a little bit of time diving more into their character so that you could effectively create the next Hans Gruber. But it's whatever. I'm not actually going to dock this movie very much for that due to my expectations going in. It's "Skyscraper" for crying out loud. Yeah, it's a dumb movie, but on a scale of 1 to 10, I had a lot of fun with this, so I'm giving it an 8/10.