Skyscraper review

Dwayne Johnson, everyone’s favourite muscleman, gets to wrestle a whole building in this action adventure that owes a massive debt to classic movies like Die Hard and The Towering Inferno.

He plays former FBI man Will Sawyer, who lost a leg in the line of duty and now works as a security consultant. His latest job is to assess the safety and security measures of the tallest building in the world, a high tech Hong Kong monstrosity called the Pearl, so he takes along his ex-combat doctor wife Sarah (Campbell) and their two kids to check it out.

That turns out to be not such a great idea, since some baddies are intent on setting the tower on fire so they can get into the skyscraper owner’s penthouse apartment because he has something they want. Oh dear, can our hero save his wife and kids (one of whom has asthma just to add in even more peril), jump from a dizzyingly high crane, climb windows using just duct tape for suction and bash bad guys with his artificial leg? Hey, it’s The Rock, people! Of course he can.

What Johnson can’t do, however, is save the movie from a ludicrous plot – it seems the whole overly complicated affair is all about a memory stick, for heaven’s sake – and a dull script. Johnson is a really funny guy as we’ve seen in numerous movies like Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle and writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber made Central Intelligence with him and comedy classic Dodgeball, and what this movie could have done with was some sharp tongue in cheek humour alongside the – admittedly often jaw-dropping – special effects.

Older kids who are still too young to see Die Hard will love it – especially the aforementioned gravity-defying and utterly bonkers jump from a crane – and there is nice support from Campbell, who gets to do a little ass-kicking of her own – but ultimately this is a movie that just about manages to coast by on Johnson’s likeability and some flashy effects but not much else.