Cinemavenger

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Skyscraper

And the Boringest Name for a Movie goes to . . . Skyscraper! 

Yup, the latest Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson flick is called Skyscraper.  It's a Die Hard knockoff, so why not Rock Hard?  Where Die Hard was a dick-tickling R, this imitator is a yawn-mongering PG-13, so why not Die Soft?  In truth, it's less Die Hard than The Towering Inferno, so how about The Towering Rockferno?  And the Rock plays a guy with one leg, so maybe even The One-Legged Man Who Won the Ass Kicking Contest?

Pretty much anything would've drummed up more excitement than Skyscraper, which so far has been underperforming worse than a wood shop kid dropped into an advanced calculus class.  Or maybe Skyscraper is crashing down at the box office 9/11-style because it's the third Rock opera to hit theaters in the past seven months?  People are screaming for scissors.  They're pleading for paper.  Anything but more Rock.

Skyscraper takes place in the fictional Pearl, the tallest building in the world.  It stands more than three times higher than the Empire State Building.  It uses giant turbines to generate all the energy it needs.  It has a 10-story park complete with waterfalls halfway up it.  At the top there's an Imax-meets-holodeck billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World. 

The Rock has to take on a team of highly trained mercenaries who have set the place on fire to force the owner to cough up some secret information.  And he has to do it on one leg leaping impossibly far from a construction crane to the burning building.  Then he has to use duct tape to scale the outside of the building.  Then he has to save his kids - one of whom, natch, has asthma (when did that shit become a Supreme Court-backed rule for these types of movies?) - and his wife.

In a movie full of that much totally unbelievable fucknuggetry, how is it that the Rock's wife (Neve "R Again" Campbell) is the most preposterous thing on display?  She's a doctor who supports her family financially while her husband tries to get a small security consulting business off the ground.  She's smart, funny and sexy.  She's tough as nails - the metal rather than the Lee Press-on kind.  Even after squirting out two kids, she's still hotter than most chicks half her age.  And I bet she's a banshee in the sack.

Yeah, because you can't walk to the corner store and back without bumping into 20 women like that.  Go fuck yourself, Skyscraper.

July 20, 2018