Mark Reviews Movies: SKYSCRAPER (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 12, 2018

Skyscraper does right by just enough of its primary elements that its weaknesses seem inconsequential. To be clear, there's nothing revolutionary here, but the film gets the job done with efficiency. There's an inherent silliness to the plot, the characters, and the assorted situations that arise, but writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber treats the material with a good balance of seriousness and humor. Above all else, though, there's something to be said about a film that has no greater ambition than to entertain with a series of fights and a variety of perilous scenarios—especially when said film delivers on its minimal goals.

This one does deliver. Its story is almost non-existent once the pieces have been put in place, and the only remaining elements of a plot exist as an excuse to put the film's hero—as well as a couple of supporting characters—in increasing amounts of danger.

It helps significantly that the hero is played by Dwayne Johnson, one of the few contemporary actors who genuinely can be called a bona fide movie star. There are probably even fewer performers who could get away with doing some of the things that this character does in the film without making it seem completely implausible. That's the superficial benefit of casting an actor as charismatic—not to mention one capable of displaying as much ease and comfort in overblown situations—as Johnson. Amidst all of the stunt-work and fighting, what can be missed, though, is that Johnson is also capable of actually giving a legitimately good and sympathetic performance.

He does here as Will Sawyer, a man with an impressive résumé of action that includes time in the military and with the FBI as part of its hostage-rescue squad (The particulars of his career are listed off at a certain point, because of course they are). The prologue, set 10 years before the main story, shows Will on his final mission with the feds (The opening shot is notable in the way Thurber reveals more and more information by simply pulling the camera back from a cottage on an idyllic, snowy night). In the end, Will is injured in an explosion, losing his left leg as a result.

In the present day, he has been summoned to a recently completed skyscraper in Hong Kong called the Pearl. At 3,500 feet, it's the tallest in the world, and Will's former teammate Ben (Pablo Schreiber) has gotten Will an interview to be charge of security for the structure. Along for the business trip are Will's wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) and their two children, Georgia (McKenna Roberts) and Henry (Noah Cottrell).

Meanwhile, there's a plot afoot against the building's owner Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han). Through some backstabbing and infiltration, the tower's residential area is set on fire, while some henchmen of the generically villainous Kores Botha (Roland Møller) disable the building's safety systems. Will is offsite at the time, but his family is trapped almost 100 stories above the ground.

The complications escalate with such speed that we can only briefly register how absurd most of them are. The cops start chasing Will as he makes his way to the building, believing that he might be involved in the arson. The villain essentially has trapped himself and his goons in the building, along with Zhao and Will's family, with only a very unlikely plan of escape. Naturally, Will wants to get back inside the structure, and that leads to the first of the film's many sequences of acrophobic dread, as he climbs a nearby crane, extends its arm toward the building, and walks out on a narrow beam above a thousand-foot plunge.

With the pieces in place, Thurber does a few obvious but viscerally effective riffs on the peril of being this high up with a lot of things that could go wrong. Will loses his grip more than a couple of times, latching on to something at the last possible second before falling to his death. The fire continues to rise through the building, leaving Sarah and her children in a frantic race higher and higher with Botha's goons in pursuit. Zhao tries to escape with the MacGuffin that Botha is after but ends up sealed in the fortress of the penthouse. The villain thinks Will can find a way inside, and that leads to yet another instance of derring-do involving some rope, some duct tape, and the whirling blades of the skyscraper's energy-generating turbines. There's a tensely ridiculous moment in which Will is dangling high above the ground, with only his prosthetic leg supporting his weight.

The film is all about providing such easy thrills, and it does so with a decent sense of momentum. What's refreshing is that Sarah gets much more to do than simply being a character in need of rescuing, and so, too, does Zhao, who's more than just some aloof, wealthy man undone by his hubris. Thurber's screenplay might only provide these characters with the most basic of motivations and background (On the other hand, do they really need any more than that?), but it is generous in giving the supporting characters more to do than we might expect.

Here are a few stray compliments. Will only once picks up but never uses a gun, which means he has to rely on his strength and his wits, and the climax provides a clever, high-tech alternative to the cliché of the standoff in a hall of mirrors. These are simple variations on the routine, but Skyscraper understands and shows that sometimes the simple things are all that we need.

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