[ad_1]
Dwayne Johnson saves. It's sort of his signature, really. An informal list of people, places and other things that the man still known as "The Rock" has protected, defended and / or saved: a young Polynesian woman, a part of the empire Egyptian, ancient Greece, San Francisco, avatars, the World Wrestling Federation, the professional secrets of tooth fairies, a band of internationally-minded outlaw runners, Kevin Hart (many times), an albino gorilla, l 39; humanity, several franchises, the concept of the action hero specifically and the movie celebrity in general. (Things that he did not save: the reputation of plaster casts as a durable object and that Baywatch leaflet.)
It has a comic timing, an absurd amount of presence on the screen, chops – see: Pain and Gain (2013) – and a body that suggests that he may have spent time indoors from a gym. But the keystone of his character is the ability to suggest that he is somehow a salt man of the earth and a pumped superhero, the kind of guy who would have a beer with you between the two. direct orphaned buses away from danger with bare hands. And nothing encourages a Johnson character to channel these two things together with the need to save his family. Put his wife and / or children in danger and watch the man go into action. He will risk his life and his limbs. He will punch and kick and, if necessary, throw a prosthetic leg. He will take a ball. And pushing to push, Johnson will climb meticulously to the top of a gigantic construction crane and escape a Hong Kong SWAT team to sprint-bound in the 100th floor of a 225-story building. Which, it should be mentioned, is on fire and full of terrorists.
This is the silver coin of Skyscraper, his summer blockbuster that is part of the disaster film, two parts Die Hard and all the star vehicle parts of the international market – you could have named this movie Holy Shit The Rock just jumped into a Flaming High-rise Flying at an incredible height! and it would be 100 percent accurate. At this point in history, we have already seen former FBI agent Johnson, Will Sawyer, negotiate a hostage, lose his leg and win a Marine surgeon woman (good back, Neve Campbell). And as we took the lead a decade after this incident, we witnessed our broken man on the rebound, having moved his wife and young children to the Asian metropolis to take a job. Sawyer will be the security consultant at Pearl, the world's largest building that houses a "City in the Sky", with apartments, a terrarium, gigantic wind turbines and a dome housing the digital equivalent of a gallery of mirrors. (If you think all of these elements will not come into play at any given time: Do not go, do not collect $ 200 and go directly to the Motion Picture Narrative 101 prison.)
Except that there are a few things between the new professional / domestic happiness – for example, a sneaky best friend (Pablo Schreiber), a mysterious object in the possession of the billionaire owner of the building (Chin Han) and a team of villains led by the stressed Euro sadist (Roland Møller). For reasons that are too complicated to enter here – let's just say that it's an iPad, a close fight and after the meal times of Panda in a zoo – Sawyer finds himself fleeing the law while his family is trapped an imposing hell. So, he climbs this crane, swaying thousands of feet in the air and causing acrobatics in the audience that begin to feel extreme vertigo.
These sequences, with Johnson swaying and jumping on the edge of a variety of bleeding edges of altitude, are clearly Skyscraper's s highlights. You know it, the star knows it and the writer and director Rawson Marshall Thurber ( Central Intelligence ) knows it without a doubt, plotting all the grunt calls and all the blows for what it's worth. Then, once Sawyer enters and begins negotiating his way through the floors while intermingling with military-grade muscle-for-hire, the movie usually installs into a somewhat generic MacGyver groove -meets-John McClane. Previously, you could take this tried and tested model and sell it by changing the locale: Die Hard on a plane, Die Hard on a train, Die Hard on a boat, maybe with a goat, etc. Now you lift-pitch with a name tag: How about Die Hard Starring The Rock ? Why not just delay the biggest movie star of today in an action movie of the 1990s and see what happens?
What you get is, unfortunately and surprisingly, something less exciting than the sum of these particular parts. When Johnson does not fight gravity and does not win, things tend to go from palm-sweat-inducing to facepalming, especially when the movie begins to drop into CGI flames and increasingly one-dimensional digital sequences. (This is one of those heavy-FX epics that feels somewhat exaggerated and super-chinty.) He also plays his physically-injured, emotionally raw character with a high degree of self-gravity, in this which seems to be an attempt at dramatic Gravitas – a decision that would be commendable if he had perhaps chosen another vehicle to do it. Yes, his determination most of the time to keep his wife and children safe gives his hero a little motivation. But stripped of her arched eyebrow charm, her performance is simply devoid of humor in a film that becomes more and more ridiculous. Good note, bad song. That's the kind of thing that requires clbadic rock, not an experimental rock, but what-if-I-can-be-played-as-it was- Sophie & # 39; s-Choice? Rock.
Barely mentioned the determined police inspector (Byron Mann), the successful woman (Hannah Quinlivan) with strikes so severe that she would give Jane Lane hair and personal insurance broker envy Billionaire (Noah Taylor) whose name we swore was Villain V. Villainy. (IMDb.com badures us that this is not the case, but we are still not convinced.) It's because the movie barely notices them, happy to draw them for an eyebrow furrow or a shine or a few shots before setting them aside until the next murderous interlude. And while Thurber gives Campbell a character who is none other than a damsel in distress – this woman is kicking the best, and it's really great to see the star of Scream on the screen – he's also the kind of director who confuses the chaos cut out for the fight scenes and the sound and fury for the actual pieces. There is not much to recommend Skyscraper after the simple pleasure of seeing Johnson do what he does, and what he does here can be clbadified under "too much" + Not enough ". The star alone can save a lot of things. Not quite that.
Source link
