Review: Skyscraper

You barely have to be aware of a movie like Skyscraper to know what it's about: it's called Skyscraper, it stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and the rest just writes itself. So yes, Johnson's character - a one-legged ex-Special Forces-turned-security-consultant family man named Will Sawyer - spends plenty of time dangling from very high up. There are explosions, a massive fire, a group of gun-toting bad guys, various computer tablets that are Very Important, and a lot of duct tape. Seriously, Saywer fixes everything with it; it's basically an infomercial for the stuff.

So it's the little things that count here. For one, the bad guys' evil scheme is astoundingly considerate: their plan is to set fire to The Pearl, a super-high Hong Kong skyscraper built by Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han) in the hope that when he flees, he'll take the thing they're really after with him. But while they're clearly happy to machine-gun literally dozens of people to sabotage the security systems, they've also planned to set fire only to the empty part of the building (it seems getting insurance for the upper floors was tricky) and as that's where Sawyer is staying with his family, their plan involves waiting until both he and his family are safely out of the building before lighting the fire. Thoughtful!

Of course, the family end up trapped anyway, so Sawyer has to bust into the burning building to bust them out. Comparisons to Die Hard have been plentiful, but they kind of miss the point; despite featuring various gun toting bad guys with complicated schemes to steal stuff from a tall building - okay, so they don't totally miss the point - this is much more of a disaster movie than it is an action movie, and Sawyer's real opponent is the building itself. Which is a good thing, because the bad guys largely get forgettable deaths (Noah Taylor's suited snob just falls out of frame with a scream).

Exactly why Sawyer only has one leg is a bit of a mystery. Well, it's not a mystery in the film; he gets it blown off in the opening scene by a hostage taking good old boy dad who just happens to be wearing a suicide vest. But aside from one point where Sawyer ends up dangling from his artificial leg, it doesn't really slow him down or impede his progress. Which may be the point: having an artificial leg doesn't mean you can't be an action hero, please support our troops. But it mostly feels like a blunt attempt to suggest that this time around The Rock just might be destructible after all (spoiler: he's not).

But that artificial leg does provide one major plus for this otherwise solidly made and competently entertaining film: it means The Rock has to spend the entire film running through flames, literally holding a crumbling bridge together with his bare hands, offing various heavily armed bad guys with household items (he swore he'd never use a gun again) and dangling hundreds of stories in the air all while wearing a slightly flared pair of baggy, comfortable business slacks. These are seriously the least stylish set of pants ever to be involved in a high-tech "hall of mirrors"-style shootout; hopefully someone made sure they went directly to the nearest museum for safe-keeping.

Anthony Morris