But appearances can be deceiving because, as the film rattles toward its finale, the Asian characters don’t really have much of an impact on the plot, and the heroics in the final act are left entirely to the westerners.Īt one point Johnson’s character remarks, “This is stupid,” a line that led to knowing laughter from the audience. Set in China (yet filmed in Vancouver), with a sizable Asian cast, on paper Skyscraper seems to be one of the rare western blockbusters to actually use its location and actors as integral elements, unlike so many other big-budget films that have crowbarred them in to make a quick buck overseas. Yet there’s a lack of snappy one-liners, the kind that usually steer a film like this into some sort of trash classic territory, and we’re stuck with a lumbering, substandard Euro-villain devoid of Alan Rickman’s flair in Die Hard (he’s stuck with dim-witted lines such as “Clever boys like you always think they can be clever”) and an insanely convoluted motivation that I couldn’t explain to you if my family were also being held at gunpoint. Logic and anything resembling real-world physics are not elements one should expect but there’s a tonal awareness during these set pieces that suggests the film-makers don’t care, with the film rarely being presented as anything but escapism. It’s as silly as one would expect but it’s also an undeniably giddy pleasure and, coupled with another heart-pumping, vertigo-inducing action sequence, this is where the film works best. Which brings us to the much-memed crane jump. But this is soon forgotten and the shift to all-out action figure stunting is all too sudden, Sawyer’s anxiety fading instantly despite being faced with a series of genuinely impossible missions. He’s nervous, vulnerable and, when he’s initially thrown into action, unsure on his feet. While his heroic physique is hard to downplay, Johnson does a solid job in the initial scenes of convincing us that he’s not the day-saver we would expect. Neve Campbell and Dwayne Johnson: ‘Right from the opening scene, we’re locked into familiar, box-ticking territory.’ Photograph: Kimberley French/AP Every detail in the first act is a clumsily dropped breadcrumb to be used later on: a joke about Campbell’s character being terrible with technology, a kid’s asthma, a hi-tech tourist attraction high in the building … it’s all screenwriting 101. While it’s a far cry from actual representation for amputees on-screen (Johnson is able-bodied, after all), it’s a small step in the right direction.Įlsewhere, the script fails to make any real inroads towards that much-touted originality. The film kicks off with our hero experiencing some standard character-building trauma (as seen in Cliffhanger, Hostage, Along Came a Spider, etc), though in a somewhat unique touch it leaves our hero without a leg. Right from the opening scene, we’re locked into familiar, box-ticking territory. Even Universal has referenced this in the marketing, with posters mimicking both Die Hard and The Towering Inferno. But using the word original in the same sentence as Skyscraper feels ill-fitting, given that it’s such a shameless regurgitation of so many other films. Even Johnson himself sub-tweeted this, selling it as some sort of scrappy underdog. Early tracking has suggested that Skyscraper will become the year’s biggest original hit, given that it’s a rare film with a $100m-plus budget that isn’t a sequel, a reboot, a remake or based on a TV show, a comic, a video game, a tweet or a discarded piece of food.
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