The Rock is in a hard place...and the audience will love it

One of my favourite genre movies is Tremors (1990) in which a small Texas town finds itself under threat from a swarm of giant sandworms. It’s a creature feature but what makes it so good is that director Ron Underwood knows it’s a creature feature and knows what the audience expects. So he uses all the genre clichés – or tropes if you’re getting fancy about it – but does so in such a way that they inform the story rather than inhibit it. The makers of the early Final Destination films did exactly the same thing.

Which brings us to Skyscraper, the second movie of the summer to star The Rock. Two Dwayne Johnson movies in one summer – what a time to be alive. Like Tremors, Skyscraper knows its foundation myths and while this is film fairly and squarely aimed at modern audiences, it has its roots in the past. There are traces of Seventies disaster movies, there is an obvious nod to Die Hard (1988) and there is even a passing glance in the direction of Orson Welles epic finale to The Lady from Shanghai (1947). But all of these improve rather than restrict the storytelling.

Johnson is Will Sawyer a former hostage negotiator turned security consultant who gets the chance to bid for the job of his life, the contract for The Pearl. This is the world’s largest building and is as hi-tech as all get out. Sawyer and his wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) are having the time of their lives in Hong Kong but, as you would expect, there is a catch.

His erstwhile boss has something that the bad guys need. It’s a computer drive but, if I’m honest, I’m not sure what it does or why they need it. Anyway this is our McGuffin and everyone wants to get it. The bad guys decide the best way to do this is to set fire to the building.

The problem is that his wife and kids are in The Pearl and while everyone thinks it’s empty Johnson has to get inside the burning building, ideally around the 100^th floor, above the fire line, and save the day.

That’s it in plot terms. David Mamet says drama hinges on two things; what does a character want and why does it have to be now? In screenwriting terms these are known as ‘stakes’ and Johnson’s stakes are impeccably established. He wants to save his family and he needs to do it now before they are burned alive.

Skyscraper pretty much hits the ground running. Johnson’s character is established in a pre-credit scene in which a situation goes a bit pear-shaped and he ends up losing a leg. The consequent prosthetic plays a huge part in the rest of the story – Sawyer’s artificial limb is like Thor’s hammer, Captain America’s shield, and Indiana Jones’s whip rolled into one.

It’s this level of invention that makes Skyscraper such fun. The plot runs on train tracks, calamity after calamity is heaped upon our hero and armed only with his wits, enormous quantities of duct tape, and his trusty prosthetic, Sawyer has to save the day.

One of the joys of the film is, in these days of over-reliance on CGI and animation, it relies almost entirely on physical effects. Those are real stunts with real stunt people and while there is a lot of green screen for background, there is real physical effort going into this. In addition, the cinematography by Robert Elswit is superb. Elswit is well known in indie circles for his work with Paul Thomas Anderson but, as his work on the Mission: Impossible franchise shows he is something of an action specialist. You can almost feel the heat and smell the smoke here.

Johnson does what Johnson does, and he does it very well; he is the right man in the wrong place at the right time. His physicality is incorporated into the characterisation but even so, the requirements of the role push him to the limit. And, in keeping with most of his movies, he does not hog the action. The female characters in his films tend to have a good deal of agency in the outcome of the story and Neve Campbell is no exception here.

Skyscraper isn’t perfect, the breadcrumbs in the script are a bit obvious, but it is tremendous fun and harks back to a simpler cinematic time while at the same time making the audience gasp with novelty and excitement.