My Review of "Skyscraper"

Skyscraper came out in 2018 and it stars Dwayne Johnson. It can easily be misidentified as another movie he had made back in 2015 called San Andreas. There are some similarities but ultimately they are entirely different movies. San Andreas dealt with a whole city falling apart whereas this movie dealt with one falling building. The similarities lie in the main character's focus throughout the movie.

We see a lot of the same sort of themes in all of Dwayne Johnson's movie roles. They all seem to have some sort of family aspect to them. This movie is not different. In this movie he's in a pretty regular nuclear family.

The movie starts off with him as some sort of military like squad trying to stop some mad man from killing his family. The mad man looks like he's going to kill his child but releases the child only to reveal he's strapped to bombs and blows everything up.

Luckily for the main character Will, he survived the bombing but he lost his legs as a result. He also meets the love of his life in the hospital. Will would eventually marry this woman and have 2 young children after 10 years.

Now he's no longer in the military but has his own security consulting firm. He's lucky to still have contacts with his old buddies because he got this huge contract with a man building the largest skyscraper in Hong Kong.

Little does will know that there are some secrets behind the building of this skyscraper that sends the whole movie into a spiral. There's terrorists that want to destroy the famous skyscraper and only in the end will you find out why.

I really though that they would play off Will's disability a lot more than they did in this movie. They played it off as if it was nothing. He was running and jumping everywhere like normal and you kind of forget that he doesn't have two legs until it's convenient for them to use this feature to help escape predicaments. It's an action movie so you can't really expect much more but maybe I was expecting a little more.

Speaking of predicaments I thought that they brilliantly foreshadowed a ton of things throughout the movie. They have a call back for so many things throughout the movie. There were small clues as to what was going to happen at the very beginning of the movie and by the end you're like oh jeez, yeah I get it. Some will groan at some of these call backs but to me they're satisfying as dad jokes. Hey man I don't want to think critically throughout all movies.

In terms of the family aspect of the movie I think they did it pretty well. I thought that they underutilized Sarah, Will's wife. She's a paramilitary officer and demonstrates that she can fight so I would have thought it would have been cool if they put her in a few more fight scenes. She is useful throughout the movie but I would have thought she'd be handling more business.

This is a family action movie in the end. It's sappy and sugar coated from start to finish. You have to be in a sort of mood to watch this or else you'll think this is cheese splattered all over the place. There's not too much thinking involved in it and the characters are all one dimensional. You know who's good and who's bad from the start. They try to have a few twists in there but you can see them a mile away.

Overall, I was still able to enjoy myself throughout this movie. I'm kind of into cheese movies though. If you're one for high brow action, I'm not sure who is, then this one isn't for you. I would have to give this movie a 6.5 out of 10. I would definitely not want to do multiple viewings of this movie but it was fun when I watched it.