'Skyscraper' review: Even Dwayne Johnson's charm can't save this mundane storyline

Movie: Skyscraper

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell, Chin Han, Roland Mollar, Pablo Schreiber, Noah Taylor, McKenna Roberts, Noah Cottrell

Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber

Genre: Action

Duration: 1 hour 42 minutes

Story:

Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) switches jobs after a rescue operation with his FBI team goes awry. The bunged up mission leaves him with an amputated leg but he meets his future wife Sarah (Neve Campbell), a Naval surgeon, and they start a family. Cut to ten years later. The Sawyers move to Hong Kong thanks to his pal Ben (Pablo Schrieber) who gets Will a security assessment job for the world's tallest building. Built by construction tycoon Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han), The Pearl is capable of sustaining a civilization on its own. The curves of the building mimic blades of grass and boast a pearl-like structure which, according to Zhao, will be the main tourist attraction.

The residential part of the 240-story building awaits security clearance from Will's company. His family moves into the mostly empty part so that Will can know every nook and cranny of the place. During the offsite assessment of the fire security measures of the skyscraper, things go south for Will and his family. Sarah and the kids get stuck in the structure along with Zhao while Will has to reach there in time to save them. On top of this pressing emergency, local police think he is behind arson when in reality, it's the local mob which is trying to take down Zhao. In this game of cross and double cross, Will manages to put out fires everywhere.

Review:

Skyscraper is director Rawson Marshall Thurber and Dwayne Johnson's second project together after the hilarious Central Intelligence in 2016. Thurber relies heavily on Johnson's charm and the CGI budget of the movie to save this mundane storyline. Every action scene featuring Johnson feels like a video game with a glitch. It begins beautifully as the story thoroughly exploits the tall structure by hanging Johnson from it every chance they get. Thurber builds suspense to such a level that there were a few gasps heard in the audience at the press screening of the show. The visualisation of these scenes is top-notch. For a second, you forget that to the chagrin of every civil engineer out there, the movie forgets about the wind effect when someone is standing 2/3rd of a mile high above ground without any rails to hold on to. You forget about physics. And when Johnson finally manages to lift himself up, you also forget to question how anyone can possibly have that kind of upper body strength and stamina.

Repetition of the same pattern of height-inferno-jump-safe becomes the biggest drawback of the movie. It is that glitch in the video game I talked about. With the completion of every step, we reset instead of making it more interesting. 

The room for interest is eliminated in the beginning. Because the emotional bond of the family is not established. They also neglect to reveal why the friends are jealous. And if it was all about a mafia heist to snatch a precious thing from Zhao, why was there a need to set fire to the structure? The climax of the movie fails to reach its full potential despite having all the tools to make it a visual masterpiece. Mirror mirror on the wall, who's missed the most brilliant cinematography opportunity of all?

Dwayne Johnson is the rock of this shabby structure. He shoulders the responsibility of holding the screen on his own, but there is only so much you can do when situations are played on the loop. Neve Campbell, Chin Han, Roland Mollar do the job they are assigned and make it an underwhelming
action movie.

Verdict:

Watch it if you are a die-hard The Rock fan.

Critic's rating: 2.5/5