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| Courtesy of Universal |
It’s not good, but – if I’m being honest – it’s a better Die Hard movie than the last two official sequels. That’s not exactly a high bar to clear, though. The fourth installment is mediocre at best and the godawful fifth is downright unwatchable.
Sure, Johnson’s charisma goes a long way at selling the derivative material, and there are a couple of genuinely tense sequences guaranteed to make acrophobes sweaty and lightheaded. However, all the effort feels so unnecessary when I can watch John McClane’s exploits in Nakatomi Plaza whenever I want. The movie is sitting on a shelf in my office, still perfect 30 years later.
Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber (making his “serious” action debut after comedies like Dodgeball and action-comedy hybrids like Central Intelligence) introduces viewers to Will Sawyer (Johnson), a former FBI hostage rescue expert and war vet who retired after a tragedy killed innocent people and took one of his legs. Now he works for himself, testing security for big corporations.
His latest assignment brings Sawyer, his wife (Neve Campbell) and his kids (McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell) to Hong Kong, where a billionaire (Chin Han) tasks him with assessing the tallest, most high-tech building on the planet. However, Sawyer quickly finds himself fighting for his family’s survival when a team of terrorists (led by Roland Møller) sets fire to the building in order to obtain an enigmatic MacGuffin.
Thurber spends a significant amount of time, energy and money to make a more extreme version of Die Hard with far less memorable results. It’s like he approached the screenplay with specific sequences already in mind that he wanted to “enhance.”
I can almost see him pitching the movie to studio execs: “You know how terrorists held John McClane’s wife hostage? In this movie, the bad guys have the hero’s wife AND kids!”
“You remember how McClane had to run barefoot through broken glass? Well, this guy has ONE LEG!”
“How about that iconic scene where McClane jumped off the roof with a fire hose tied around his waist? This guy uses duct tape! And, uh... he has to jump through spinning blades! Yeah!”
“You remember when one of the bad guys fell off the building? What if he also EXPLODED?!”
You get the idea. Unfortunately, Thurber doesn’t seem to understand what made Die Hard so memorable was the relative simplicity of the plot and the small moments of joy and fun scattered throughout. Those elements ensured that the movie – although dark and violent – never felt unrelentingly bleak.
Instead, the filmmaker runs into the exact same pitfalls that made Die Hard 2 such a slog. While Johnson once again commits to the project (I don’t think the dude has ever sleepwalked through a role), it’s tough to emotionally invest in a ludicrous storyline that takes itself far too seriously – especially the shockingly nihilistic opening sequence.
Even Johnson’s usual deftness with one-liners falls flat here. Comic relief feels out of place in a movie where dozens of innocents are mowed down with machine guns in a scene that’s basically treated as an afterthought and never mentioned again.
While we’re on the subject: I’m no prude, but I was shocked at the level of violence Thurber was able to get away with and still maintain a PG-13. Parents, I strongly recommend checking the movie out before taking the kids. It’s bonkers that Skyscraper and Johnson’s Jumanji remake have the same rating.
It also doesn’t help that the screenplay telegraphs every plot development an hour in advance thanks to exposition overload. Thurber might as well have used flashing neon arrows. I literally knew how the movie was going to end before Sawyer and his wife finished their first conversation.
Still, as I said before, it’s not all bad. Johnson’s enthusiasm covers a multitude of cinematic sins and I truly appreciated that Thurber didn’t make Campbell’s wife character a stereotypical damsel in distress. She frequently helps Sawyer out of jams and takes down her share of bad guys as well. In a perfect world, that kind of equality in an action movie wouldn’t be praiseworthy – it would just be the standard. Yet, here we are.
Regardless, it probably doesn’t matter what I think. Skyscraper isn’t the kind of movie geared toward critics. People still love The Rock and I’m guessing they’ll show up to support his latest project, even though I didn’t love it. But the flick did manage one accomplishment: it made me want to watch Die Hard again as soon as possible.
Skyscraper is rated PG-13 for sequences of gun violence and action, and for brief strong language.
Grade: C
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