{"id":18512,"date":"2018-11-03T02:00:17","date_gmt":"2018-11-03T06:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=18512"},"modified":"2018-11-15T02:04:50","modified_gmt":"2018-11-15T07:04:50","slug":"br-skyscraper-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=18512","title":{"rendered":"BR: Skyscraper (2018)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Film<\/strong>: Good<\/p>\n

Transfer<\/strong>: \u00a0Excellent<\/p>\n

Extras<\/strong>: Very Good<\/p>\n

Label:\u00a0<\/strong> Universal<\/p>\n

Region:<\/strong>\u00a0A<\/p>\n

Released:<\/strong>\u00a0 October 9, 2018<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong>\u00a0 Disaster \/ Action \/ Suspense<\/p>\n

Synopsis:<\/strong>\u00a0A wounded S.W.A.T. officer must rescue his wife and kids from terrorists in the world’s tallest building.<\/p>\n

Special Features:<\/strong>\u00a0 Audio commentary by writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber \/\u00a0Extended & Deleted Scenes (10:18) \u00a0with optional commentary by director Thurber \/ 6 Featurettes: “Dwayne Johnson: Embodying a Hero” (4:05) + “Inspiration (4:12) + “Opposing Forces” (2:34) + “Friends No More” ( 3:18) + “Kids in Action” (2:41) + “Pineapple Pitch” (1:38).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Review:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is stupid.\u201d — Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) sensing something\u2019s amiss with the building’s design (and perhaps\u00a0Skyscrape<\/strong>r\u2019s dialogue).<\/em><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s really tragic when a good premise and a few inventive jolts to the disaster film formula are torpedoed by lackadaisical script, but writer-director-co-producer Rawson Marshall Thurber is wholly responsible for hobbling what could\u2019ve been a decent genre entry.<\/p>\n

Thurber\u2019s Towering Inferno <\/strong>(1974) and Die Hard<\/strong> (1988) hybrid starts off with a teaser in which former S.W.A.T. team member Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) confronts an angry father holding a family hostage, and sensing a moment of humility, Sawyer gives the aggressor a moment to lower the son and give up, but a bomb vest (presumably) kills the father & son, and scars Will and colleague Ben (Pablo Schreiber) for life.<\/p>\n

Now using a titanium prosthetic for his partial left leg, Will\u2019s brought in by Ben as a safety consultant for Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han), a wealthy yet less bellicose Trumpian builder of gleaming commercial towers whose world\u2019s tallest building in Hong Kong is nearly complete. For reasons known only to Ji, Will’s entrusted with an iPad that enables complete control of the building \u2013 no one else among Ji’s team is gifted with that power or degree of redundancy in case Will\u2019s killed and \/ or the iPad is stolen.<\/p>\n

Naturally an attempt to swipe the digital skeleton key happens within minutes after Will and Ben leave the tower, and he soon discovers brother-in-arms Ben set him up out of revenge: whereas the bomb blast ultimately gave Will a family with a loving wife and two kids, Ben has remained a bitter bachelor, seething with jealousy. The result: sacrificing Will to the henchmen of a corrupt Icelandic \/ South African thug named Kores Botha (Roland Moller).<\/p>\n

After Ben\u2019s \u2018accidental\u2019 death during a fight, Will heads for the tower to save wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) and the kids when a fire erupts and heads upwards to the Sawyers’ apartment. Naturally the Hong Kong police think he\u2019s guilty; naturally Botha\u2019s got another team nullifying the building\u2019s safety features off-site to neutralize an attempt to stop the fire; and naturally the police think Will\u2019s somehow responsible for the fire, and that his determination to scale an 80+ storey construction crane to reach the 96th floor and save his family are part of a clever ruse.<\/p>\n

Johnson\u2019s always had great screen charisma playing the decent, wry, cheeky hero who will always transcends the worst pain or dire circumstances with brawn and sharp thinking, but he\u2019s also slummed his way through some mediocre roles, such as the kid-friendly 3D adventure Journey to the Center of the Earth<\/a><\/strong> (2008) and its vapid sequel Journey 2: The Mysterious Island<\/strong> (2012). To ensure a maximum PG-13 rating, Thurber\u2019s tailored the film to be profanity-free, gore-free, nudity-free, and keep things moving no matter how preposterous.<\/p>\n

Ludicrous acts of heroism are innate to the disaster genre, especially after Die Hard<\/strong>\u2019s John McLane (Bruce Willis) jumps off the roof of the Nakatomi tower tethered to a fire hose, and lands inside an office after he swings back and shoots a glass pane to gain fast entry. Thurber ups the danger by having Will scale the crane from its exoskeleton (Where\u2019s the inner emergency ladder?), swing a hook to crash an office window, run and leap to the already inflamed building, making the jump without any major damage, McLane-style.<\/p>\n

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\u201cOh, come on, man.\u201d — Will Sawyer, feeling the burn from excessive ridiculousness.<\/em><\/p>\n

In a later scene in which he applies duct tape to his hands, Will walks along the building\u2019s slick exterior to reach the single most preposterous locale for accessing the building\u2019s locking system: a panel in the centre of a whirring, egg beater-like fan that helps ventilate the massive 200 storey-ish structure.<\/p>\n

Taking a idea from Galaxy Quest <\/strong>(1999), in which characters count the rhythm of intersecting blocks to reach the other side of a long walkway, Thurber has Will take a moment to count the egg beater\u2019s cycle, and not only reach the panel unscrambled, but hastily leap back to the ledge when further flames are about to engulf the beater\u2019s nucleus. In Galaxy Quest<\/strong>, the smacking blocks are meant to be ridiculous, but Thurber\u2019s variation is played largely straight, and is endemic of his inability to find that fine line between drama, parody, and nonsense.\u00a0An almost perfunctory approach to wrapping up any action sequence really hinders attempts to give it some solid gravitas, and perhaps shows a palpable lack of confidence in Thurber\u2019s own writing & plotting.<\/p>\n

A father rescuing his family from terrorists and plowing through outrageous circumstances in integral to the Die Hard<\/strong> franchise: in\u00a0Live Free or Die Hard<\/a><\/strong> (2007), McLane rescues his daughter from cyber crooks; and in the inept & shallow sequel A Good Day to Die Hard<\/a><\/strong> (2013), he fights evil Russians with his ne\u2019er do well son. Thurber\u2019s dialogue is so dumb in spots that one feels his real concern was building elaborate sequences instead of reinforcing his genuinely compelling hero \u2013 a wounded S.W.A.T. member now carrying the extra emotional burden of not only rescuing his family, but struggling with the betrayal of close pal Ben.<\/p>\n

In Wolfgang Peterson\u2019s own poorly executed disaster entry Poseidon<\/a><\/strong> (2006), separate groups of survivors escape the doomed ballroom and New Year\u2019s revelers and find brief haven in a huge verdant atrium, but are separated by inverted elevators and twisted walkways; in Skyscraper<\/strong>, Thurber has the kids, Sarah, and Will separated in a huge tiered green garden, with access to elevators and pathways obstructed by fire, flaming panels, shattering glass, and the only walkway joining two sides of the massive garden now severed.<\/p>\n

All but three members of Team Sawyer are reunited, but to wrap up the scene, Will (Johnson), seemingly oblivious to the encroaching fire, says to his wife in the most perfunctory manner, \u2018We should go now,\u2019 because the smoke is \u201cbad\u201d for the son\u2019s asthma. That leads to another heavily compacted sequence that should\u2019ve been milked for its inherent intensity: after placing them in a surviving elevator cab, he instructs Sarah and their son on how to avoid Human Tomato Syndrome by pulling the emergency brakes at a precise time.<\/p>\n

A further crack in the script\u2019s logic has evil Botha telling a bruised Will to figure out a way to unlock the door to Ji\u2019s titanium-doored home \/ office space and hand-deliver the film\u2019s MacGuffin \u2013 a USB stick that can expose Botha\u2019s network of money laundering \u2013 on the roof before he throws Will\u2019s daughter off the tower. There\u2019s no way for Will nor Botha to contact each other once they separate at Ji’s office, yet as per the script’s hasty leaps, Will arrives just before the daughter\u2019s forced to fly like a bird into the super-heated wind. Why Botha didn\u2019t leave a thug to watch over Will is very obvious: instead of being meticulously plotted with pockets of irony and luck and some brutal hand-to-hand combat, the film was structured as a brisk, fast-paced genre riff with a series of challenging yet PG-friendly obstacles involving wan characters.<\/p>\n

Besides playing a haunted amputee and devoted father, Johnson is left to fill in the huge gaps of his otherwise compelling character; wife Sarah is the former combat nurse who received him after the opening hostage crisis, but aside from two quick fight scenes, Campbell’s character is very minor; the kids are mere pawns moved around to ultimately drive Will towards the top floor; no further info or personality details are given for master builder Ji, except he used illicit funds to finance his priapic edifice; and Mr. Pierce (Noah Taylor), Botha\u2019s mole within Ji\u2019s entourage, is no more than a snooty British twat. Botha himself has just one moment where the character\u2019s vengeance feels genuine: even if he never acquires the MacGuffin, Botha\u2019s greatest satisfaction is forcing Ji to observe his monument burn and crash into the streets directly below where the police and emergency teams have allowed thousands to congregate (and take selfies).<\/p>\n

The grand finale takes place in the eponymous \u2018pearl\u2019 of the building, where it holds not a library, not art treasures, not a quiet space for Trumpian egotists to ponder global economic playing, but a mass of digital mirrors that pop up for no particular reason except to confound Ji\u2019s guests \u2013 hence a slight chase and plenty of gunfire in a sequence clearly riffing the hall of mirrors in the finale of Orson Welles\u2019 The Lady from Shanghai<\/strong> (1947). It\u2019s a fun homage, but in spite of the digital wizardry, the sequence is less effective than the spoof at the end of Woody Allen\u2019s Manhattan Murder Mystery<\/a><\/strong> (1993), which is better cut, better shot, more amusing, and uses wholly practical effects.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the finale and other sequences were designed for the film\u2019s post-3D rendering, but not everything in Thurber\u2019s otherwise pretty sound story has purpose. Some are fun \u2013 Sarah\u2019s rapid elevator descent is slightly harrowing \u2013 but they feel trimmed to keep the film well below the 2 hour mark. The hand-to-hand choreography between Ben and Will is fine, but it’s overcut and disorienting.<\/p>\n

Thurber also makes the same mistake as other directors of disaster films: the mass and magic of the super structure wherein the drama unfolds is given short shrift when it is in fact a character of equal importance to the hero and villain. With consultation from Adrian Smith<\/a>, architect of the Burj Khalifa<\/a> in Dubai and the emerging Jeddah Tower<\/a> in Saudi Arabia, the Pearl tower is an amazing creation; it\u2019s a pity it doesn\u2019t actually exist in some form (and in fact, looks better than the Burj and Jeddha phalluses). The Pearl is bisected in the middle by a series of tiered gardens within the building\u2019s glass shell, but like most of the interiors, they’re underused. Not much info about the Nakatomi building was given at the onset of Die Hard<\/strong>, but we follow MacLane through the buildings innards, exterior and roof to grasp its dangerous geography; and in The Towering Inferno<\/strong>, modest time is spent on the buildings design, electrical system, and innards as experienced by the architect, the fire chief, and minor characters who either live or work in the mega-tower.<\/p>\n

A post-main titles, newsreel-style montage compacts the uniqueness of the Pearl, but seeing a CGI diagram isn\u2019t the same as sharing the wonder of the building through the eyes of the characters; neither are trips in fast moving elevators in the first third, nor the peculiar moment when Ji transforms the orb’s interior into a giant glass pane hovering above Hong Kong. We know the Pearl is tall. Show us why it\u2019s so damn tough to navigate by having Will do some grunt-level searching, missteps, wrong turns, improvised routes, and near-misses.<\/em><\/p>\n

For all the hype, Skyscraper<\/strong> feels like a medium-budgeted production with some daytime exteriors and aerial footage of Hong Kong interpolated with primary Vancouver locales, and limited studio space where a heavy degree of green screen supports the illusion of the Pearl\u2019s inner depth. Characters enter static sets, perform their action & dialogue, and exit for the next sequence. Case in point: Botha and his team fertilizing the hallway carpet on the Sawyer\u2019s floor, igniting it with the sprinkler system, and leaving by elevator \u2013 quick, fast, neat, but perfunctory.<\/p>\n

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Wrapping it up<\/strong><\/p>\n

After good triumphs over evil, Ji\u2019s tells Will the Pearl will be rebuilt, which gives the film some post-9\/11 resonance. The finale (naturally) mandates father & daughter reuniting with mother & son in front of TV cameras, allowing for a possible sequel, but Will Sawyer is no John McLane \u2013 he lacks his depth and wry sense of humour. In spite of appearing in Thurber\u2019s prior comedy Central Intelligence<\/strong> (2016), Johnson\u2019s denied moments and quips to make Will an endearing hero of what may be the first of a short-lived franchise from Universal, a studio with a history of less than ideal disaster entries, such as Earthquake<\/strong> (1974), Rollercoaster<\/strong> (1977), and Daylight<\/strong> (1996).<\/p>\n

The big losers in this otherwise glossy production include Hong Kong. The city is underused in cheap cutaways to anxious onlookers at street level, and Asian actors are given very little to do. Chin Han (Ji) is forced to play a secretive, savvy businessman of few words; Hannah Quinlivan\u2019s evocation of Botha’s evil right hand Xia is reliant on a peek-a-boo haircut, vacuous big eyes, and grating pout; veteran character actor Tzi ma (TV\u2019s 24<\/a><\/strong>) has a blink fast and he\u2019s gone role as the fire chief; and Byron Mann plays a less than perceptive Inspector Wu who bickers with his subordinate and only grasps Will\u2019s innocence when multilingual Sarah manages to express in plain American English \u2018Why would my husband burn down a building when his family\u2019s inside?\u2019 Wu only changes his stance when he\u2019s facing a colossal Duh moment.<\/p>\n

The irony of these weak roles is that a few scenes meant to show the Asian characters have greater thinking capacity were left on the cutting room floor. The deleted and alternate scene gallery contains material with incomplete or raw CGI effects, and although the dialogue isn\u2019t good, the scenes give the actors a bit more material: Ji sort of explains why the building won\u2019t collapse in spite of the vertical inferno heading towards his feet, and more interesting, there\u2019s a longer conversation between Insp. Wu where he argues the same \u2018Why would Will do all this?\u2019 to his doubtful subordinate who seems more open to this far more logical take prior to Sarah\u2019s subsequent blunt interaction. As it stands in the theatrical cut, Wu and his team are pretty dumb.<\/p>\n

Steve Jablonsky\u2019s score is fairly restrained, often functioning as a discrete (albeit repetitive) sonic motor during action scenes rather than expressing any subtext or adding a bit more depth to the film\u2019s tepid characters. His heroic theme is fine, but also generic, reflecting the score\u2019s safe design that doesn\u2019t challenge audiences or transcend the script\u2019s weaknesses.<\/p>\n

Robert Elswit\u2019s cinematography (Boogie Nights<\/strong>, Good Night, and Good Luck<\/a><\/strong>, Nightcrawler<\/a><\/strong>) is very crisp and beautifully composed. The CGI artists crafted a believable tower, and the gliding pod elevators recall the scope and futurism of the underground Krell city in Forbidden Planet<\/a><\/strong> (1956). Most of the CGI effects for the flaming exteriors and inferno engulfing the innards are nicely done, including a few swooping movements when Will looks down from a blasted-out window towards the smoldering danger below \u2013 images designed to create a sense of audience interaction which likely paid off in the post-rendered 3D version released in tandem in cinemas, and Blu-ray.<\/p>\n

Universal\u2019s disc has the standard array of special features: an audio commentary, generic making-of featurettes, plus a reel of deleted and extended scenes, of which the most interesting are the aforementioned dialogue exchanges between the Honk Kong police, and a rejected revelation that the Mr. Pierce we see in the final film isn\u2019t a mole on Botha\u2019s payroll, but a fake sent to infiltrate Ji\u2019s entourage. The real Pierce lies very dead in Ben\u2019s bathtub, seen in brief cutaways after Ben\u2019s been shot during the fight with Will.<\/p>\n

Some of the dramatic slivers should\u2019ve been retained \u2013 a longer version of Will found in the rubble after the opening bomb blast and being wheeled into Emergency where he sees a wounded Ben adds to Will\u2019s emotional trauma \u2013 whereas others are redundant, especially a cutesy Sawyer family hugfest in a park.<\/p>\n

Very few disaster films transcend the genre\u2019s clich\u00e9s and expand the possibilities of the genre \u2013 Die Hard<\/strong> works because it\u2019s a full-blown satire played very tongue-in-cheek by its authors and cast (and composer) but still delivers stunning action sequences, but it too spawned imitators and sequels which rarely held their own against its parentage. Bigger didn\u2019t make better in DH2, but the reworking of an unproduced serial killer thriller for DH3 allowed for sharp satire and ridiculous circumstances which still propelled the heroes towards man-to-man combat with the villain.<\/p>\n

Will Sawyer shares one important trait with John McLane that for good or bad, is inherent to the post DH-genre entries: he’s a comic book action figure. The disaster hero is capable of surviving direct contact with hard elements (fire, water, steel); he can defy gravity (being a human slingshot now & then); and yet he remains human because he\u2019s also a dad, a husband, and a professional lawman with a strong moral centre. Will Sawyer will<\/em> save his family and then attempt to apprehend Botha if possible, just as John McLane will<\/em> save his wife and innocent suits & ties (and cokeheads) and apprehend Hans (Bubby) Gruber; when these reasonable goals fail, well, then gravity will claim the most morally bankrupt in both films.<\/p>\n

Let’s see if Skyscraper 2<\/strong> brings needed refinements to what could evolve into a modest franchise.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2018 Mark R. Hasan<\/p>\n

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