As we hit the midpoint of the summer movie season, it’s about time for cinemagoers to get an overstuffed and enjoyable action movie to satisfy their need for huge explosions, seemingly indestructible heroes and a wicked, mustache-twirling bad guy.
Sadly, Skyscraper ain’t it.
It’s not that the new Dwayne Johnson-starring disaster-actioner doesn’t desperately want to be your best opportunity to unplug, settle down in darkness and chow on popcorn while shouting “Holy shit!” at the screen, it’s just that you’ve seen this movie hundreds of times, and done much better, especially 30 years ago, when the first and best iteration of the right guy in the wrong place subgenre debuted. You might even remember the little film I’m talking about. It was called Die Hard, and trust me, Skyscraper really, really wants to be Die Hard when it grows up.
Die Hard featured Bruce Willis as a New York cop visiting Los Angeles to make amends with his wife when a slew of nasty terrorists suddenly takes control of the towering Nakatomi Plaza.
Skyscraper stars Johnson as Will Sawyer, a war veteran and former FBI agent turned security consultant, visiting Hong Kong to assess the safety features of The Pearl, a 220-plus-story residential/commercial monolith, when terrorists suddenly take control and set it ablaze with Sawyer's family inside.
Die Hard relied little on exposition to immediately clue viewers in as to Willis’ backstory and his frayed relationship with his wife, who no longer used his last name.
Skyscraper opens with an unnecessary FBI raid that culminates in a botched explosion, which only exists to tell viewers that Sawyer lost half of his left leg in the blast and that he met his wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) in the operating room because she was his surgeon.
The leader of the terrorists in Die Hard was Hans Gruber, the biggest and best bad guy ever introduced on screen, who wanted to steal millions in bearer bonds from an impenetrable vault.
The main bad guy in Skyscraper is Kores Botha (Roland Møller), who is so generic and inconsequential that you don’t even learn his name or why he’s trying to burn down The Pearl until well past the midway mark of the movie. What Botha is after also is a big letdown — a thumb drive.
A fucking thumb drive.
In Die Hard, Willis’ John McClane essentially kept to the top floors and the roof of Nakatomi Plaza, yet he somehow survived multiple firefights, an explosion and a leap off the building with a fire hose tied around his waist.
In Skyscraper, The Pearl is billed as one of the most technologically advanced high-rise towers ever constructed, yet in today’s advanced society, all that means is Sawyer has to punch a few buttons on a control panel key pad to figure out exactly how the building operates. And Sawyer spends an inordinate amount of time outside of The Pearl, or leaping onto The Pearl or hanging off of The Pearl, which fails to generate the same sense of wonder and excitement as a guy (McClane) crawling through a ventilation shaft with no idea what’s waiting on the other end.
In Die Hard, McClane is assisted by a Los Angeles patrol cop named Al Powell and harassed by a deputy police chief and two FBI agents for interfering with an international incident and endangering dozens of hostages. There’s also an ambitious (and douche-y) news reporter who tracks down McClane’s children for a live broadcast. That all made sense, and gave our everyman hero several relatable foils in addition to the heavily-armed terrorists.
In Skyscraper, Sawyer doesn’t have any allies. He’s a one-man band with one-and-a-half legs who refuses to be thwarted whether he’s scaling a giant crane, leaping great distances through the air or avoiding a deadly turbine blade to find yet another control panel that will allow him to access yet another secret subset of digital directives. Sawyer’s adventures are inexplicably displayed on giant monitors in downtown Hong Kong, where a growing crowd inexplicably cheers him on even though local news reports are labeling Sawyer as an international menace. All the while, local Inspector Wu (Byron Mann) watches from inside a police command center and randomly says things like, “Go find Sawyer. I want to ask him questions.”
The climatic face-off in Die Hard between McClane and Gruber only needed a blown-out window, miles above the street, some duct tape and a wristwatch to generate white-knuckle suspense.
In Skyscraper, the big showdown between Sawyer and Botha takes place at the top of The Pearl inside a gleaming ball that looks like a pearl and was constructed out of thousands of high-definition monitors and screens. Early on in the film, viewers get a taste of this technology when the building's architect, Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han), shows Sawyer how the screens can essentially reflect both the inside and outside world, creating either a super-cool hologram where it appears you’re standing in the sky above Hong Kong or an elaborate funhouse where the screens function as mirrors, disguising the location of the people inside.
Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber completely botches his big finale, in this regard. The final fight is muddled, difficult to process and confusing, which is a huge letdown given the early focus on the technology and its potential for creating a vibrant environment.
The bulk of Skyscraper’s problems can be tracked back to Thurber, who exploded onto the Hollywood A-list in 2004 with the hysterical cult classic Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. His last movie, which also starred Johnson, Central Intelligence, showed nowhere near the same level of precision and irreverent physical comedy that distinguished Dodgeball from its peers.
There’s also zero comedy in Skyscraper, which is a mistake. It's exhausting in its seriousness. There’s little care given to creating flesh-and-blood characters. Yes, everybody loves Johnson, and he does a fine job, but he seems out of place here, much like he did in San Andreas. The reason Die Hard is one of the best action movies ever made is that John McClane could be any of us. He wasn’t a ripped muscle god or a technology wizard. He was an overworked cop just trying to make it to Christmas morning with his wife and his life intact.
The only relatable character in Skyscraper is Campbell’s Sarah Sawyer. She’s resourceful, level-headed and fiercely badass when she needs to be.
In the end, the fact that Skyscraper is just another generic, indistinguishable action flick falls squarely on Johnson’s massive, tattooed shoulders.
If you’ve read any of the bajillion magazine features about Johnson in recent months, given that Skyscraper is the third (!!!) major release he’s toplined since December, including Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Rampage, you know that Johnson is specific about how his characters are represented to audiences. He wants to be a sterling example of humanity, the kind of man who always put family first. He wants his films to have a happy ending so that people leave the theater smiling.
In that regard, Skyscraper is a hit.
But what it’s missing is an edge, some measure of vulnerability and uncertainty, a little darkness to make the light reflect that much brighter.
What’s the point of going to an action movie if you already know that the good guy will unquestionably emerge victorious, that he won’t experience any significant loss, that he won’t find himself in such a deep hole that he questions everything and has to battle both his own nagging insecurities along with a bevy of highly-skilled bad guys just to hug his lady one more time?
That’s the Dwayne Johnson movie I really want to see. Whether Johnson the movie star ever gets out of his own way long enough for such a film to happen is anybody’s guess.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at bloodviolenceandbabes.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.
