Dwayne Johnson has a knack for choosing the absolute worst scripts floating around Hollywood. He's apparently the new Arnold but none of his movies have the quality that Schwarzenegger gave us during his peak. In the 80s and for much of the 90s, Arnold gave us several classics and genre icons such as Conan, Terminator 1 and 2, Commando, Predator, The Running Man, Total Recall, even Last Action Hero in retrospect. Virtually ALL of Johnson's career has been low-culture trash, and most of his movies are green screen nightmares. Has this man ever even left Los Angeles when filming these forgettable bores?
Taking much of its inspiration from The Towering Inferno, the movie has Johnson as an ex-FBI type who is now the head of security at the world's tallest building in China (a market that movies of very low quality consistently pander to). When terrorists set fire to the structure in an act of revenge he must get inside and save his family who are trapped above the fire. It takes over an hour for this to happen. The movie is 102 minutes long, including credits.
The thing about The Towering Inferno, and other movies from that era, is that once the effects become dated and bettered by more recent movies the weaknesses in the script become more apparent. At the very least, that movie had double literary merit, adapted from two separate novels. It also had a star-studded cast (for the time) and had a hefty 165-minute running time that capably builds tension. Dated it may well be, but it still stands (even if ablaze), and is a far superior film to the imaginatively-titled Skyscraper.
If you are going to hand a $120,000,000 budget to a director so he can make a blockbuster disaster movie then obviously the money is in the safe hands of the man who gave us Dodgeball. The script is so sloppy, disjointed, badly-paced, utterly illogical, cliche-ridden, and predictable. Rawson Marshall Thurber (a descendant of one of Bambi's forest friends) just. does. not. have the talent to make this exciting or the writing ability to give us anything other than an assembly of heavily-used tropes. He didn't research a damn thing and bolted this junk together from what he's seen in other movies. Real world physics, rules, procedures, accuracies, and human logic are not elements that are woven into his illiterate marmalade. Much of it seems to be directly lifted from Lupin the 3rd: Farewell to Nostradamus, infinitely more exciting than this junk.
There is an excessive amount of establishing scenes which build to nothing. The opening raid is pointless, and the resulting injury on poor Mr. Johnson doesn't justify it. Having your lead character be an amputee (who is seemingly just as able-bodied as he used to be) is not an instant weakness to counterbalance his muscles and brute force. It's so lazy and contrived I felt like shouting "how dare you" at the screen. Mr. Johnson (I refuse to refer to these "characters" by their names as they are all irrelevant) is naturally framed for the arson because Thurber needs an easy excuse to add more difficulty and obstacles to pad the running time. With no help from the police he must get into the building on his own and does so by climbing a self-erecting crane, not even up the ladder but by hauling himself up the steel frame...with one leg.
The fire is on the 96th floor. He climbs, more on less, 100 floors worth of crane without his muscles locking up, without getting out of breath, in unbreakable record time...with one leg. There's no excitement here, he might as well be Superman. Imagine if Steve McQueen did that in The Towering Inferno! It also amazes me that no matter how far up these characters go they are rarely buffeted by the wind unless the plot calls for it. I work in a six-floor building and the penthouse sounds like the sound design for Twister. Obviously the lazy production design forgot to add giant fans to sit beside the excessive green screens.
It infrequently cuts to a side story involving a beautiful woman who is in on the heist, but it's completely benign and adds nothing. If you took this away, removed the opening scene, and had Mr. Johnson get into the building a little sooner the movie would have lasted about 87 minutes. If you were to also remove the pointless scenes involving the utterly, utterly useless Hong Kong police then we're doing to about 79 minutes. Nothing in this movie serves the story, rather it's just all a tiresome excuse to make the next "thing" happen.
Can someone explain how Mr. Johnson who is Samoan, Black Canadian, and a bit Irish, and Neve Campbell (purely white) have children darker-skinned than them? Or are they adopted? I don't even care. They're not even characters, just blocks in Thurber's Lego Duplo stack of plastic. "Look, Mommy, I made a skyscraper."
A lot of the dialogue is delivered off-camera or with the character's mouth movements hidden. The cynic in me thinks that this is a lazy attempt at making foreign market dubbing (particularly China) more accommodating. This is such a horrible example of artless corporate filmmaking by a talentless hack.
Dwayne Johnson needs to distance himself from these desperate blockbusters and start choosing his projects with more care. His name does not guarantee quality, not by a million miles.
This movie has no soul and should be abandoned into the dark, inescapable void into which Thurber looks for inspiration.
Taking much of its inspiration from The Towering Inferno, the movie has Johnson as an ex-FBI type who is now the head of security at the world's tallest building in China (a market that movies of very low quality consistently pander to). When terrorists set fire to the structure in an act of revenge he must get inside and save his family who are trapped above the fire. It takes over an hour for this to happen. The movie is 102 minutes long, including credits.
The thing about The Towering Inferno, and other movies from that era, is that once the effects become dated and bettered by more recent movies the weaknesses in the script become more apparent. At the very least, that movie had double literary merit, adapted from two separate novels. It also had a star-studded cast (for the time) and had a hefty 165-minute running time that capably builds tension. Dated it may well be, but it still stands (even if ablaze), and is a far superior film to the imaginatively-titled Skyscraper.
If you are going to hand a $120,000,000 budget to a director so he can make a blockbuster disaster movie then obviously the money is in the safe hands of the man who gave us Dodgeball. The script is so sloppy, disjointed, badly-paced, utterly illogical, cliche-ridden, and predictable. Rawson Marshall Thurber (a descendant of one of Bambi's forest friends) just. does. not. have the talent to make this exciting or the writing ability to give us anything other than an assembly of heavily-used tropes. He didn't research a damn thing and bolted this junk together from what he's seen in other movies. Real world physics, rules, procedures, accuracies, and human logic are not elements that are woven into his illiterate marmalade. Much of it seems to be directly lifted from Lupin the 3rd: Farewell to Nostradamus, infinitely more exciting than this junk.
There is an excessive amount of establishing scenes which build to nothing. The opening raid is pointless, and the resulting injury on poor Mr. Johnson doesn't justify it. Having your lead character be an amputee (who is seemingly just as able-bodied as he used to be) is not an instant weakness to counterbalance his muscles and brute force. It's so lazy and contrived I felt like shouting "how dare you" at the screen. Mr. Johnson (I refuse to refer to these "characters" by their names as they are all irrelevant) is naturally framed for the arson because Thurber needs an easy excuse to add more difficulty and obstacles to pad the running time. With no help from the police he must get into the building on his own and does so by climbing a self-erecting crane, not even up the ladder but by hauling himself up the steel frame...with one leg.
The fire is on the 96th floor. He climbs, more on less, 100 floors worth of crane without his muscles locking up, without getting out of breath, in unbreakable record time...with one leg. There's no excitement here, he might as well be Superman. Imagine if Steve McQueen did that in The Towering Inferno! It also amazes me that no matter how far up these characters go they are rarely buffeted by the wind unless the plot calls for it. I work in a six-floor building and the penthouse sounds like the sound design for Twister. Obviously the lazy production design forgot to add giant fans to sit beside the excessive green screens.
It infrequently cuts to a side story involving a beautiful woman who is in on the heist, but it's completely benign and adds nothing. If you took this away, removed the opening scene, and had Mr. Johnson get into the building a little sooner the movie would have lasted about 87 minutes. If you were to also remove the pointless scenes involving the utterly, utterly useless Hong Kong police then we're doing to about 79 minutes. Nothing in this movie serves the story, rather it's just all a tiresome excuse to make the next "thing" happen.
Can someone explain how Mr. Johnson who is Samoan, Black Canadian, and a bit Irish, and Neve Campbell (purely white) have children darker-skinned than them? Or are they adopted? I don't even care. They're not even characters, just blocks in Thurber's Lego Duplo stack of plastic. "Look, Mommy, I made a skyscraper."
A lot of the dialogue is delivered off-camera or with the character's mouth movements hidden. The cynic in me thinks that this is a lazy attempt at making foreign market dubbing (particularly China) more accommodating. This is such a horrible example of artless corporate filmmaking by a talentless hack.
Dwayne Johnson needs to distance himself from these desperate blockbusters and start choosing his projects with more care. His name does not guarantee quality, not by a million miles.
This movie has no soul and should be abandoned into the dark, inescapable void into which Thurber looks for inspiration.