Skyscraper (2018)

Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Chin Han, Roland Møller, Neve Campbell, Byron Mann, Pablo Schreiber, Noah Taylor, McKenna Roberts, Noah Cottrell, Tzi Ma, Hannah Quinlivan. [PG-13]

Shameless cross between Die Hard and The Towering Inferno sticks Johnson’s private security specialist into a super-duper Hong Kong skyscraper—taller even than the Burj Khalifa—while it’s on fire and under attack from a team of terrorists led by Møller. Why doesn’t he make like a tree and get outta there? Because his family is trapped in that thousand-meter state-of-the-art “chimney”, of course. The pieces are here for a little dumb excitement, but the experience is spoiled by too much unattractive lighting and unconvincing CGI; the hanging-on-by-the-fingernails sequences might have been legitimately suspenseful if they didn’t look so phony (the fourth Mission: Impossible movie raised the bar to an unfair level, what can I say?). It’s a brainless way to kill some time, so if you can believe that a man with a prosthetic leg can jump from a crane to a building ledge, you’ll be willing to overlook the fact that the only time anyone ever seems bothered by smoke inhalation is during one episode involving a kid with asthma. But couldn’t the hero have been given any kind of fresh spin besides the leg, and couldn’t a more memorable gang of baddies have been assembled? Writer/director Thurber co-produced with Johnson, among others.

40/100