Review of Skyscraper (2018) by Laura B — 25 Aug 2018

I would like to say that this movie is as abysmal as the titular skyscraper is tall: only about 3/5ths of a mile. Maybe I can't solely blame writer Rawson Marshall Thurber. Maybe I'm more pissed off at the idiot who hired him to write for The Rock twice. Who seriously watches Central Intelligence, a character-driven buddy-cop action-comedy starring one of the highest paid working comedians alongside one of the highest paid action stars of the day, and says "good enough"? In retrospect, that movie is going to be a five dollar Wal-Mart bin Blu-ray, but considering that almost every movie Dwight Johnson has starred in over the past decade is a cruel joke on anyone who pines for the silly thrills of Schwarzenegger's peak cinematic output, I'm almost afraid that it's "The People's Champ" himself pissing these movies down his leg (or, in this case, down his lack thereof).

We could go on The Rundown of all of the problems with this movie that spell its certain Doom, but at the end of this Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, Shazam!, I have to Snitch on the real San Andreas-sized fault in The Game Plan of Thurber's Longshot of a script: I could tell from five minutes in how it would conclude because of the frighteningly horrible foreshadowing. That scene where Neve Campbell whines about how she wants The Rock to turn her phone off and turn it back on because she likes to withhold her affection for him until, in his Marine PTSD/de-legged state, submits to her technocratic whims is simply there to make the horribly handled last-minute deus ex machina have some sort of poetic justification.

The most ridiculous thing about the film is not that The Rock saves his family and foils the chaotic violence of an international criminal syndicate on the tallest building in the world with one leg and some duct-tape. It is that, even with such an expansive and ridiculous series of parameters, international audiences should be subjected to one of the most milquetoast wastes of hundreds of millions of dollars because absolutely no one in Hollywood is willing to make light of the absurdity of this scenario. This is played straighter than the castrated corpse of Fred Phelps, and nobody, not even the Chinese market, wants to see that.