When The Rock said Skyscraper is heavily inspired by Die Hard, he wasn’t kidding. This movie IS Die Hard… venti-sized with extra ice. In place of a jacked New York City cop played by Bruce Willis, we have a JACKED AF one-legged ex-FBI agent played by The Rock. In place of a regular tall building, we have a THE TALLEST BUILDING IN CGI HISTORY — midway through the movie, we’re reminded that the building is a bajillion stories high. In Die Hard Willis has a wife. Here, The Rock has a wife and two kids, one of whom suffers from asthma.
Director Rawson Marshall Thurber takes everything Die Hard and makes it BIGGER and LOUDER. More explosions! More death-defying stunts! More piu piu piu! Well, almost everything. Watching Skyscraper, I couldn’t help but wonder if Thurber and The Rock (who also gets a producer credit) actually understand why people constantly revisit John McTiernan’s classic to this day. Die Hard is a beloved film not just because of its action set pieces (we’ve seen far superior ones, perhaps not then, but definitely since), but for its inexhaustible personality. For its zany characters. For its unexpectedly funny moments. And most importantly, for its constantly beating heart.
Skyscraper has none of that. Which is ironic, considering Rawson Marshall Thurber is known for making comedies with enormous personalities, a lot of heart and comical characters. His previous two films, Central Intelligence (also starring The Rock) and We’re the Millers were some of the hardest laughs I had in their respective years. Thurber is a talented comedic director. But he seems to have abandoned all his Thurber-isms when helming this film.
The story is as we see in the trailers. Will Sawyer (The Rock), is a former FBI agent — he faced tragedy on the field and lost a leg — turned security specialist who gets hired by a promising client/billionaire, Zhao (Chin Han) to check the security system of a one of a kind tower called The Pearl in the middle of Hong Kong. After a thorough examination, The Rock tells Zhao “your security is fine,” which translates to “shit is about to go down real soon son!” When shit does go down, courtesy of a mysterious villain who sets the building on fire, The Rock does everything in his power — which apparently includes scaling half the length of the tallest building in the world in a few minutes (takethatEthanHunt!) — to save his family.
I go to the movies for the characters. But this movie has none. Skyscraper is all action and nothing more. What made the original Die Hard work so well is that in between the action-heavy sequences are character moments that are either entertaining as heck or emotionally moving. Like the friendship and respect that grows in between Willis’ John McClane & Powell (Reginald Veljohnson). And who can forget Alan Rickman’s snarky, slimy Professor Snape-y performance as the villainous Hans Gruber?
Skyscraper on the other hand, is simply a “The Rock” showcase. Thurber does try to make Will Sawyer’s family the emotional core of the film. But it isn’t effective because they’re already a loving, happy bunch right from the start. Will Sawyer isn’t trying to prove that he can be a good dad or a good husband. He already is.
But if not about proving himself to his family, this movie could’ve been about Sawyer finding himself and getting his mojo back, after not just losing his legs, but his sense of self too. But as the film blatantly mentions, his life only got better after the incident — he met his wife at the hospital. As a result, there isn’t any room for his character to grow. So why are we rooting for him? It’s just explosions and shootouts for the sake of it without underlying themes we can latch onto.
If you’ve watched The Rock during his WWE days or in any of the Fast and Furious movies, you know he’s great at going back and forth with someone. He’s at his most entertaining when there is someone standing toe to toe with him and trading witty/badass lines.
That scene (video above) wreaks of pure entertainment because we have The Rock and Vin Diesel (who’s awesome only in these Fast & Furious movies) going back and forth one-upping each other. In Skyscraper, our villain, who has a personality of a toothpick barely exchanges a single line of dialogue with The Rock. In fact, the character writing of the villain is so shallow, it would be humanly impossible for me to describe it. Forget his motivations, I can’t for the life of me even remember his name or what he looks like. The villain is barely even in the movie.
Earlier, I may have poked fun at the ridiculousness of The Rock scaling half the length of a building faster than King Kong, but let me be clear that the sheer stupidity of certain set pieces is something that I can easily forgive (I am a Fast & Furious apologist, I can forgive plenty). But here’s the kinda shit that annoys the fu*k out of me. The next paragraph (in between the picture and the trailer) contains spoilers. But seriously, guys, it’s a The Rock summer movie. Do you really give a damn about spoilers?
Anyway, just like in the first Die Hard, for more than half the film, we’re sitting there wondering why this group of “terrorists” are doing what they’re doing (which is good if the reveal turns out to be good). Later they tease a red object hidden in Zhao’s super secret vault. As it turns out, once upon a time Zhao borrowed money from some thugs (or something). Later they extorted Zhao. Zhao returned the money but not before putting a tracking device that is able to locate and steal all their information (from their illegal transactions to their money laundering activities), which Zhao is keeping with him as protection so they won’t try and extort money from him anymore (what?).
Somehow these thugs found out about the tracking device (huh?). So, the villains light up the whole building on fire and do what they do to steal the red flash drive from Zhao. And for some odd reason half the gangsters are Russian (I think) and the other half are Chinese (I’m sure) and they’re all based in Hong Kong. We learn all this in the last 10 minutes of the movie — which I’m sure is when the director (and also screenwriter) Thurber realised he needs to wrap this whole circus show up and so haphazardly scribbled down what essentially reads:
B U L L S H I T M C G U F F I N.
But despite all that, despite the one-dimensional characters and the stupid plot, Skyscraper isn’t terrible. And that’s mostly due to the trailblazing people’s champion himself, The Rock. The Rock doesn’t have much to work with as far as character writing is concerned, but the man is so damn charismatic it’s difficult not to enjoy his presence. He’s so much fun! It’s also not easy to feel for him, though, especially when you know he can kick your ass, one-legged or not. But there are moments where The Rock really sold the vulnerable side of him and he deserves props for that.
And while Thurber fails in terms of story, he gets it right with the action sequences that for the most part are competently directed. Sure, a lot of it is CGI, but it isn’t distracting and it does offer some stunning visuals, particularly the climactic action set piece involving a crap ton of mirrors. Will Sawyer’s prosthetic leg getting stuck in the rope as he hangs on for dear life — as we see in the trailers — also plays out surprisingly well. There are scenes in the movie that will genuinely scare the crap out of people who are afraid of heights.
All in all, I didn’t hate Skyscraper. It didn’t make me want to kill myself. And not a single moment did I find myself bored out of my mind. Mostly because I would gladly smell The Rock’s cooking all day all night. But also because of some legitimately thrilling, enjoyable action sequences. This is the very definition of a throwaway movie. But if Mr Dwayne Johnson thinks he’s given us this generation’s version of Die Hard, he’s kidding himself. And this is coming from someone who doesn’t even love Die Hard all that much.
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