Skyscraper review: New Dwayne Johnson film is fun in its own fiery, very noisy way

Dir Rawson Marshall Thurber, 102 mins, starring: Dwayne Johnson, Pablo Schreiber, Neve Campbell, Noah Taylor, Kevin Rankin, Roland Moller, Tzi Ma

“This is stupid,” Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s character Will Sawyer says to himself late on in Skyscraper. It’s a remark that could apply to the movie itself. At the time he makes the observation, Sawyer is balanced precariously on an outside ledge 200 floors up the “Pearl”. Built in Hong Kong, this is the world’s tallest building. It cost $6.5bn and is supposedly disaster proof. It’s a “Fort Knox” in the sky and yet terrorists have managed to set it on fire easily enough barely before the opening credits are over. Sawyer lost a limb 10 years before and is, therefore, inching across the ledge on a prosthetic foot. He has to manoeuvre himself behind a turbine to find a secret fuse box which will open the chamber where the Chinese owner of the building, Zhao Min Zhi, is hiding from the thugs.

It’s a sign of the half-baked nature of the film that Sawyer is continually being upstaged by his own artificial foot. This limb is used to clomp villains on the head, prise doors open and even as a climbing aid. The other main element in the film is the duct tape which Sawyer uses to patch himself together whenever he is injured – and which you can’t help but think the screenwriters would have been well advised to use to patch the flaky script together too.

Sawyer is another of Johnson’s staunch, all-American heroes. He became an amputee when working for the FBI, but has rebuilt his life as a security consultant and is tendering for a job at the Pearl. If he gets the job, it will be a “game changer”. His weakness is that he’s utterly devoted to his family – his tough as nails wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) and his two kids. Needless to say, they’re caught in the towering inferno when it catches fire.

Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber’s approach is shamelessly derivative. He’ll throw any fuel he can onto the blaze. He kindles the movie with ideas taken from Irwin Allen disaster movies, from Die Hard or even from The Lady From Shanghai and The Man With The Golden Gun. (For no particular reason, the skyscraper has an enormous hall of mirrors.)

The film is quite fun in its own fiery, very noisy way. Johnson’s tongue seems at least partly in his cheek. His screen-stealing antics are matched by those of the baddies, sneering, scowling terrorist Roland Moller, crooked businessman type Noah Taylor, and lethal, leather-clad, floppy-haired female assassin Hannah Quinlivan, who kills almost everyone she encounters. The real mystery here is how the filmmakers managed to pay so much attention to special effects and spectacle and so little to plotting and characterisation.