Sky­scraper

I’ll lev­el with you, dear read­er: I like Dwayne John­son. I moved past my dis­like of Michael Bay to watch Pain & Gain. I went to bat for Ram­page. I’m extreme­ly excit­ed about the forth­com­ing ​‘Dwaythem’ Fast & Furi­ous spin-off. Dwayne’s win­ning charm and bulging biceps have made him a main­stay of action cin­e­ma since he burst onto the big screen in The Mum­my Returns back in 2001, and for a man worth over $190 mil­lion, he seems pret­ty down to earth.

But even the staunchest Rock apol­o­gist would be hard-pressed to find mer­it in his lat­est offer­ing, which sees him reunit­ed with his Cen­tral Intel­li­gence direc­tor Raw­son Mar­shall Thurber.

In Sky­scraper, John­son is Will Sawyer, a for­mer FBI hostage nego­tia­tor who, fol­low­ing a botched res­cue oper­a­tion which result­ed in him los­ing a leg, has found a new call­ing as a risk asses­sor for a new mega-sky­scraper in Hong Kong. Built by sto­ic bil­lion­aire Zhao Min Zhi (Chin Han), ​‘The Pearl’ is the tallest build­ing in the world, hous­ing a shop­ping com­plex, a park com­plete with water­fall, and res­i­den­tial floors.

Sawyer is tasked with over­see­ing final secu­ri­ty checks before The Pearl opens to the pub­lic, and for some rea­son he’s brought his fam­i­ly with him – wife Sarah (Neve Camp­bell) and their young twins, Geor­gia and Hen­ry. Chaos beck­ons like an old friend, and soon Will is fac­ing off against a gag­gle of clichéd bad­dies, includ­ing a sexy-badass femme fatale, sniv­el­ling British suit, and misc Euro mercenary.

The mar­ket­ing cam­paign around Sky­scraper has sold the film based on a sin­gle moment in the trail­er, where John­son per­forms an implau­si­ble leap from a crane into the tit­u­lar build­ing. Even this appears infi­nite­ly less impres­sive with­in the con­text of the film, in which the dis­tance between the crane and the build­ing is sub­stan­tial­ly reduced. In fact, all the action in the film feels odd­ly low-stakes, per­haps due to the fact the vil­lains are inter­change­able char­ac­ters, and we have no rea­son to care about any­one who isn’t played by John­son. Ques­tion­able premis­es have been sold on the strength of his star pow­er for a while now, but Sky­scraper real­ly tests the lim­its of his charisma.

Sky­scraper is a bor­ing film. It brazen­ly bor­rows from the likes of Die Hard and The Tow­er­ing Infer­no but fails to inject any heart or humour into the action. Worse still, some old-fash­ioned gen­der bias attempts to mine humour from the false notion that women are some­how tech­no­log­i­cal­ly impaired, while John­son namechecks Duct tape so fre­quent­ly you begin to won­der what kind of lucra­tive prod­uct place­ment deal must have been struck.

Iron­i­cal­ly for a film about a mas­sive rag­ing fire, Sky­scraper is com­plete­ly devoid of warmth. Add to that the eye­brow-rais­ing deci­sion to por­tray Johnson’s char­ac­ter as dis­abled (in one scene, a thug tries to beat Sawyer up with his own pros­thet­ic leg) and the whole thing amounts to an emp­ty, vio­lent spec­ta­cle that doesn’t even have the decen­cy to be mild­ly entertaining.