Reuniting with the director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who used his star’s charisma khổng lồ enliven the mediocre action comedy Central Intelligence, Johnson plays a former FBI hostage rescue team leader, war veteran and skyscraper security assessor(!!!), Will Sawyer. He’s working in đài loan trung quốc on the Pearl, the tallest & safest building in Hong Kong, while also living there with wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) và two kids. But, when a fire starts, Sawyer finds himself framed by terrorists and, yeah, you can probably guess where this is going.
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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 đoạn clip game, a tweet or a discarded piece of food. Even Johnson himself sub-tweeted this, selling it as some sort of scrappy underdog. 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 Universal has referenced this in the marketing, with posters mimicking both Die Hard & The Towering Inferno.
Right from the opening scene, we’re locked into familiar, box-ticking territory. 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 chất lượng touch it leaves our anh hùng without a leg. 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.
Elsewhere, the script fails to lớn make any real inroads towards that much-touted originality. Every detail in the first act is a clumsily dropped breadcrumb lớn 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.
Which brings us to lớn the much-memed crane jump. 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. Ngắn gọn xúc tích and anything resembling real-world physics are not elements one should expect but there’s a tonal awareness during these phối pieces that suggests the film-makers don’t care, with the film rarely being presented as anything but escapism.
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Set in trung quốc (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 khổng lồ make a quick buck overseas. 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, & the heroics in the final act are left entirely lớn the westerners.
At one point Johnson’s character remarks, “This is stupid,” a line that led khổng lồ knowing laughter from the audience. This is stupid but it’s also mostly entertaining, thanks lớn Johnson và a plot that moves fast enough khổng lồ retain our attention yet without enough, ahem, the originality khổng lồ ensure it lingers in our minds once the fire has been extinguished.