In a Nutshell
Buildings get destroyed as much as your brain cells do in this adaptation of an 1980’s video game.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2231461/
Review
Well, that sucks declares Florida’s own Hercules – Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson – during one of the many destructive moments within a film that’s so unremittingly stupid I just couldn’t stop laughing. No one else was really laughing but it sums up what’s wrong with this type of film: You laugh at it rather than with it but you get a sense of the type of movie it could have been. It could have been the Airplane of Kaiju movies but instead, it’s the Super Mario Bros of video game adaptations…pointless and not very good. And minus that cool Roxette song. ‘Member Roxette? No, really? Okay then.
For some reason, the movie opens on a space station. For some reason, there’s DNA altering experiments going on here. For plot reasons, things go wrong. For my numerous sins, I had to watch this movie. You really don’t remember Roxette? She had that song on the Pretty Woman soundtrack. It was a big hit!
I’m not really going to talk about the plot of mutant animals – a crocodile, a (flying squirrel) wolf and a gorilla – tearing shit up or eating people or murdering thousands of people (actually, I’ll come back to this point) in one souped-up act of destruction after another. No, I actually want to talk about how Joe Manganiello (he takes his top off a lot in various things and looks like that good looking kid who bullied you in school) shows up in what looks to be a major role only to get Executive Decision-ed after about 5 minutes of screen time.
It Must Have Been Love
They set him up with one of those tracking-from-behind-shots to signal his importance and bad ass stature and then finally show his face to reveal cool scars and you think, okay, I get the sense he’s going to be important. Except he’s not. He’s redundant. Much like this movie. Jeffrey Dean Negan from The Walking Dead shows up too. He doesn’t get Executive Decision-ed unfortunately but instead shows that he’s just seen Val Kilmer in Tombstone and thought, hey, I can do that!
Dwayne Johnson plays a primatologist and I don’t think I’ve seen a primatologist on the big screen since Sigourney Weaver played Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist. Also Bryan Brown was in that film. He was in F/X and F/X2: The Deadly Art of Illusion. ‘Member those? Yeah, me neither. I wonder why they didn’t make a third film? I wouldn’t have watched that one either. Anyway, the point is, you should probably go watch Gorillas in the Mist for, well, an example of a good movie but also one that likely has a more accurate portrayal of a primatologist.
I like Dwayne Johnson. Sort of. He could make bolder choices at this stage of his career and he’s got bucket loads of charisma and he seems like an okay guy. But mostly kids are going to see this movie and I have a problem with that. The violence and senseless destruction on display is something that plagues modern blockbusters, where thousands of humans die on screen and it’s just not healthy for kids to be exposed to. The violence has no weight or real consequences.
Dressed for Success
To say “on screen” is something of a misnomer too as we don’t actually really see this death but it’s happening and it’s numbing to see buildings fall and not think of what those images are evoking, sub-consciously or not. For kids to see that violence has no weight is dangerous. It’s as dangerous as Christian Bale’s Batman pummeling Heath Ledger’s Joker. Watch that scene again and ask yourself why it creates this weird, cognitive dissonance sensation inside your brain.
You can’t really blame future US president (not joking) Dwayne Johnson for the malaise that seems to infect almost every summer blockbuster but a satirical take on this type of movie could have exposed the flaws in film-making that seems to have little regard for human life and Johnson would’ve been a perfect delivery device for such a satire. As it is we just get a movie that, well, sucks.
Verdict
Rampage is rubbish. Avoid. Revisit the hits of Roxette instead.
