Ram­page

The world doesn’t deserve Dwayne John­son. Human­i­ty has done pre­cious lit­tle to mer­it being blessed with a being as pure of heart and strong in spir­it as he. Every time he lights up a cin­e­ma screen with a wag­gle of his icon­ic eye­brows, every time he saves the world through the pow­er of his hulk­ing biceps and sheer dumb luck, it becomes increas­ing­ly evi­dent that he is our only hope. While watch­ing him team up with a giant albi­no ape named George in order to Save The World, a famil­iar thought comes to mind: What a time to be alive.

Pre­sum­ably, this is how peo­ple felt when they encoun­tered Ram­page for the first time back in 1986, when it appeared as an arcade game cre­at­ed exclu­sive­ly for US eatery Dave & Busters. Mash­ing the joy­stick and but­tons to make furi­ous George (or Ralph the Wolf, or Lizzie the Dinosaur) lev­el a city pro­duces the same feel­ing of car­nal sat­is­fac­tion that one gets watch­ing Ralph’s cin­e­mat­ic cousin effort­less­ly snatch a heli­copter out of mid-air.

But wan­ton destruc­tion isn’t enough in 2018, where bru­tal block­busters are a dime a dozen and all-out war is threat­ened dai­ly out­side of the movies. Rampage’s strength, then, lies not in its zany con­cept but in its glee­ful, big-heart­ed exe­cu­tion. At the heart of this – at the heart of every­thing – is Dwayne Johnson’s Davis Okoye. A for­mer Spe­cial Ops sol­dier turned anti-poach­ing expert turned pri­ma­tol­o­gist at San Diego Wildlife Reserve, he has a spe­cial bond with Rampage’s famous goril­la, and des­per­ate­ly seeks to bring the way­ward ape back from the mess caused by an indus­tri­al acci­dent at the hands of nefar­i­ous evil-doers and genet­ic med­dlers Eng­y­ne, who are fid­dling with ani­mal DNA in order to pro­duce bio­log­i­cal weapons.

But even The Rock can’t save the world on his own. So he’s joined by fierce and high­ly capa­ble Dr Kate Cald­well (Naomie Har­ris) and rootin’ tootin’ Tex­an gov­ern­ment agent Har­vey Rus­sell (Jef­frey Dean Mor­gan) in order to bring George home. Russell’s a scep­tic, but seems wild­ly amused by the wide­spread chaos caused by the escaped mon­key. ​“When sci­ence shits the bed, I’m the guy they call to change the sheets,” he cheer­i­ly tells a scowl­ing Davis.

Else­where Malin Åker­man is surly and ruth­less as vil­lain­ess Claire Wyden, while Jake Lacey plays her incom­pe­tent, stress-eat­ing younger broth­er, yet giv­en that the film’s cen­tral threat comes from the three mega mon­sters lay­ing waste to the nation, their pres­ence (and indeed the pres­ence of Joe Man­ganiel­lo as a stock mil­i­tary hardass) only serves to remind us that humans are the great­est preda­tor of all.

There are some gen­uine­ly fun CGI sequences here, includ­ing a glee­ful sub­ver­sion of the ​“It was Beau­ty killed the Beast” line from King Kong. If Ram­page the video game was an 8‑bit riff on that clas­sic ape text, then Ram­page the block­buster is a riff on Amer­i­ca – par­tic­u­lar­ly the ​“bomb ​’em til they stop mov­ing” approach to both domes­tic and for­eign threats. It’s telling that in Ram­page, it’s left to a pair of sci­en­tists and one rogue gov­ern­ment agent to save human­i­ty (or at least down­town Chica­go) in both a phys­i­cal and metaphor­i­cal sense. They do what the mil­i­tary and pri­vate con­trac­tors fail to: unf*ck the world. The fate of George, a gen­tle giant with an unde­ni­ably human face, is the fate of all of us, and when John­son signs ​“fam­i­ly” to his simi­an son, he means it.

And of course, it had to be Dwayne – America’s mus­cle­bound sweet­heart, with his nat­ur­al charis­ma and reas­sur­ing cadence he’s the def­i­n­i­tion of ​‘a safe pair of hands’. Ram­page sim­ply wouldn’t work with­out him. With both our polit­i­cal and eco-sys­tems on the brink of col­lapse, respite is mere­ly a cin­e­ma trip away – for a small fee you can sit in a dark room, relax, and indulge in the fan­ta­sy that The Rock can save us all. Or indeed, that we’re worth sav­ing in the first place.