Skyscraper
Let’s just go ahead and say it and own it- “Skyscraper” is basically “Die Hard” with a taller building and The Rock. Now, with that out of the way, I enjoyed this as the action schlock that it is. Dwayne Johnson plays a former soldier/FBI agent who, after a tragic explosion at a hostage negotiation, is walking with a prosthetic leg, and now runs his own security testing firm. He’s been asked to test the security system for The Pearl, a state-of-the-art, 255-floor housing and conference area that is the tallest building in the world. When terrorists seize control of those security measures, however, he has to figure out a way to save the building, and his family, as a first begins to engulf the building.
That’s a pretty basic setup, and it doesn’t have a lot of imagination in the way writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber (who directed “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story,” no less) tells it. The motivations are fairly standard action movie fair, Johnson is given plenty of moments to flex his action star muscles, and we get plenty of death-defying set pieces that border on the ridiculous. But let’s discuss Johnson’s on-screen wife, for a second- Neve Campbell. Campbell is a former military doctor who has some tours of duty herself in Afghanistan, and she is staying in the residential area of The Pearl with her husband along with their two kids. Campbell and the kids find themselves in the middle of the inferno as Johnson’s Will Sawyer was away from the building on business before he is almost set up for being involved in the plot. If you’re expecting Campbell’s wife character, Sarah, to just wait around for her husband to arrive and rescue her, though, she has a bit more agency, and ingenuity, to her. She’s still relegated to the sidelines, at times, but she turns out to be just as important to the film’s story as Will is, and Campbell is more than up to the role. This is where I’m willing to just barely give the film a positive grade, because Neve Campbell (who isn’t in enough significant work nowadays) is used quite well in the movie.
You’re either someone who can enjoy a cheesy action movie or you aren’t. The Rock and Campbell bring their, at least, B+ game to Thurber’s cliche-ridden script, and make it mean more than it really should. This isn’t a reinvention of the wheel, and it isn’t trying to be. This is silly, bombastic nonsense. Often, that will fall flat. Because of the actors in the middle of the action, this one doesn’t. It’s a fun summer diversion, and I’ll take that.
