SKYSCRAPER ■ $125M DIE HARD fan flick
DIE HARD has become its own genre. It’s used as an elevator-pitch comparison to similarly framed action movies. For instance, SPEED is ‘DIE HARD on a bus’. THE ROCK is ‘DIE HARD on Alcatraz’. OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is ‘DIE HARD in the White House’. And so on. SKYSCRAPER fits into this mould, too, but the trick is that, when simplified, it’s ‘DIE HARD in a high-tech building’… which is redundant, because that is DIE HARD.
The more accurate description, then, becomes SKYSCRAPER is ‘DIE HARD with Dwayne Johnson’. That’s not usually a bad thing. Despite a recent misstep with RAMPAGE, Johnson shows he has a keen eye for crowd-pleasing roles. In SKYSCRAPER, he plays Will Sawyer, a security specialist who’s tasked with appraising the security of a towering skyscraper called The Pearl.
He brings his wife, Sarah (Neve Campbell), and two kids along to check out the soon-to-be-opened tourist attraction when it’s attacked by the typical nefarious types. Make no mistake, you’ve seen this type of movie dozens of times before in terms of familiar familial stakes and cookie-cutter baddies, but it’s SKYSCRAPER’ self-awareness that stops it from being a mere clone.
Johnson’s charisma goes a long way to keeping things firmly in entertainment territory for the vast majority of the movie, while the constantly rising stakes make for some memorable set-piece moments. SKYSCRAPER isn’t the kind of contemporary action movie that’s an instant classic like JOHN WICK or MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, but like OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, SKYSCRAPER has enough DIE HARD-like good stuff going for it that it’s hard to not get caught up in the fun.
