Skip to main content

The Tiring Inferno


Not long before hitting theatres, a poster was released for the action movie Skyscraper that in art style and design was an homage to the original poster for Die Hard, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary the weekend Skyscraper opened. And I have to applaud Skyscraper for the honesty in admitting directly with its poster that it was nothing more than a rehash of older better action movies, with only imitation to offer itself.
Skyscraper is the first non-comedy film from director Rawson Marshall Thurber, and it definitely feels like it’s made by people who don’t know the genre they’re working in. Entirely driven by the gimmick of disaster, conspiracy, and danger taking place on the tallest building in the world, it’s not aware that this concept and the action set-pieces that result from it, aren’t at all original.
Veteran FBI officer Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) is hired as the security inspector for “The Pearl”, a recently unveiled record-breaking skyscraper in Hong Kong. But on his first day on the job the tower is besieged by enemies of the Pearl’s architect (Chin Han) who dismantle its safety net and begin to set the building on fire. With his wife (Neve Campbell) and two children living on one of the residential levels, Sawyer goes to drastic measures to rescue his family and stop the terrorists.
In spite of the comparison drawn by the film itself, Skyscraper is less Die Hard and more an unofficial remake of The Towering Inferno, though it steals plenty from both. The plot is really convoluted and its direction is dictated by the next action set-piece, which is where the movie hopes it will impress. The Pearl is a technologically advanced, Modern style tower allowing for some heftier obstacles than in The Towering Inferno, such as spinning blades on the side of the building and a lookout point near the top that can become a house of mirrors for no reason. But these sequences don’t impress. Audiences have seen this kind of stunt-work before and it’s less easy to suspend our disbelief. And when the story doesn’t support these action scenes and can’t stand on its own at all it makes this film about terrorists on a burning skyscraper rather dull.
The film does a strange thing by opening on Sawyer’s backstory during a hostage situation that has the most minimal relevance to the rest of the story. All it does is weakly set up Sawyer’s aversion to guns (he has no problem beating up a lot of people though), his prosthetic leg, and one of the villains’ equally weak motivations. Afterwards, it tries to get into the main action as quickly as possible which opens more than a few very noticeable plot holes. At one point the villains set their eyes on Sawyer specifically as the only person who knows the tower well enough to get them what they want, despite him having just been hired that afternoon. And then there’s just the fact that every character makes stupid choices. For instance, one dying character with a gun decides as his last act not to shoot the villain, but rather to shoot and damage the helicopter so as to strand the terrorists on the burning building, as well as their surviving captives. And in the case of Sawyer, like many a poorly written action movie lead, he always goes for the most extreme option first. Upon realizing his family is trapped in the Pearl, instead of informing the police, firefighters, or other first responders, his immediate course of action is to climb to the top of a nearby building and break in himself using a precarious crane, a sequence which crosses the threshold from cool to silly.
There’s not much investment in the acting either. The evil terrorist leader is one-note, unthreatening, and stereotypically Russian. Han performs capably, but Noah Taylor, as with every movie he’s in, is just waiting to come out as a villain. It’s nice to see Neve Campbell in a movie again, but her role is little more than motivation followed by plot device. And as for Johnson, he’s lacking his usual charm. He plays his character too dramatically and the script and director don’t give him enough opportunity to exercise his strengths as an entertainer. His disability factors into the action in a couple fun ways, but that’s his only unique feature. And if the only interesting facet of Dwayne Johnson’s character is the fact that he’s got an artificial foot, I’d have much rather preferred Adam Hills in the role.
Skyscraper wants to be a tribute to the kind of high adrenaline hyper-masculine action movie of decades past, but only copies the formulas without adding any substance. The result is a movie that even makes Rampage look enjoyable. The Towering Inferno and Die Hard are far better movies. Why would you go to a theatre to be condescended to by this dull reproduction?

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

A Stylish and Charmingly Reinvented David Copperfield

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)  is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol ), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield  is to understand Dickens himself. Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world an...
Post a Comment
Read more