Skyscraper (2018)

(On Cable TV, March 2019) If you want a look at the state of the blockbuster film at the end of the 2010s, it would be hard to do better than Skyscraper. Featuring Dwayne Johnson as a security expert working to protect a massive high-rise building in Hong Kong, it works on familiar elements on and off the screen. When a character in the film proudly claims, “Chinese Money, American Know-how!,” they could just as well be talking about today’s Hollywood, with Asian money financing Hollywood films doing their best to appease Chinese censors just to have a chance at playing to a billion Chinese moviegoers. It wouldn’t simply do for our hero to battle terrorists in a building: Skyscraper adds wild science fictional threats and sticks the hero’s family in the building to heighten the stakes. It’s also cribbing from the most popular screenwriting books of the moment in other ways: The first fifteen minutes (once past the prologue) are a non-stop carnival of plot devices exposition: pay attention, because there will be a test later on. Johnson and writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber have a nice working relationship after working together on Central intelligence, and the film is clearly designed to play to his strengths. It’s also fun to see Neve Campbell back in the blockbuster field after nearly a decade of lower-profile pursuits and a parental break. Filled to the brim with top-notch special effects, Skyscraper feels obligated to throw in futuristic plot devices and IT nonsense, including a hall-of-mirrors sequence that takes Orson Welles’s original concept one step further for better or for worse. While the plot elements are familiar, Skyscraper’s execution is competent enough in its genre to be an average blockbuster action film. However, it’s pretty much all soulless … which practically guarantees that it will disappear without a trace once the marketing money runs out.