All comparisons to Die Hard aside – and there are many – Skyscraper is an exceptional Hollywood action movie. It stars Dwayne Johnson, or The Rock, who is the America’s only true action movie superstar, an actor as charismatic as he is super human. Johnson’s body, a double-wide barrel chest framing a 6’4” height, seems inhuman, and yet, as a performer he is so genuine and so incredibly nice. I can’t remember the last time an action star traded so readily on his vulnerability for other people. The good guy defying odds to save his family is a trope as old as the movies, but Johnson is the only one who actually feels like a dad. This time, Papa Johnson is placed in the (fictional) tallest building in the world, square in the middle of downtown Hong Kong, hovering ominously over the rest of the world.

Johnson plays Will Sawyer, a former military man and FBI agent who lost his leg during a hostage scenario gone wrong. In the aftermath he met his future wife, Sarah (Neve Campbell), who was the head nurse on his recovery. Ten years later, Will has started his own small business as a security analyst and, with a few connections, he is able to snag the ultimate job: accessing the security system for ‘The Pearl’, a 240-story building, financed and constructed by Chinese venture capitalist Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han). ‘The Pearl’ has yet to open its residential portion which is everything above the 96th floor, as it waits to pass Will’s assessment. Of course, Zhao and Will’s plans are foiled by a Scandinavian crime syndicate, led by a diabolical terrorist named Kores Botha (Roland Moller), who shuts down the building’s security and starts a fire on one floor that starts to climb steadily up the building.

With Sarah and his two children trapped inside the burning Pearl, Will becomes gripped with determination and spends an entire night climbing not only nearby scaffolding but eventually the side of the building itself, often dangling over the edge, gripping with one hand. As he fights through the building, trying to find his family, he uses the only tools handy: his detachable leg and a whole lot of duct tape. Beat by beat, we know how Skyscraper plays out, and writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber (puzzlingly, the same director behind comedies like Central Intelligence and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) hits each note with the appropriate amount of thrill – especially for any fellow acrophobes who will turn to dust in the face of many of the high-end dangling Johnson’s Will is asked to do. The special effects surrounding ‘The Pearl’ are impressive in that they display the absurdity and the megalomania that would go into its production, and a needless room of mirrors sets up a terrific action set piece that alludes to Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai.

Skyscraper‘s script is filled with more plot holes than plot points, and a good chunk of the film is basically a commercial for FaceTime, various tablets and the basic infrastructure of Hong Kong, but the movie also offers a nice alternative to many of these kinds of films: including an active role for Neve Campbell’s Sarah, who is a far call from these movies’ average damsel wife character, but an active participant in her own rescue. The same could said of the Sawyer children (played by McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell), who together create the kind of it-takes-a-village mentality that actually paid dividends. This film is incredibly silly and, at times, seemingly thrown together with the same “duct tape can fix anything” attitude of its main character, but it was also legitimately fun, occasionally scary and an overall pleasure to watch.

 

 

Written and Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber