New Release Review: Rampage

Rampage

(2018. Director: Brad Peyton. Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman)

SYNOPSIS:
Primatologist David Okoye (Dwayne Johnson) finds it easier to befriend animals than humans. When his favourite gorilla, George, is exposed to a mysterious chemical he is shocked to find him growing in size and aggression. While trying to save George he discovers that he wasn't the only animal affected by the pathogen.

What kind of film is Rampage?

Rampage is the kind of film that begins with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson giving a fist bump to a giant albino gorilla named George.

In fact, that's not true. Rampage begins with a scene where Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson tries to give a fist bump to a giant albino gorilla only for said gorilla to pull it's hand away, laughing, and flip him it's middle finger.

There's not too much point in continuing the review from here. From this alone you should already know if you could enjoy this film or not. Rampage is not exactly the kind of film to touch hearts and lift souls but this wouldn't matter if it delivers the suitable amount of...well...rampage. Thankfully the answer to that question is a resounding yes, as long as you're willing to wait for it.

At a time when every household name is being considered for a movie adaption (from Battleships, to Angry Birds to...ugh...The Emoji Movie) it's inevitable that more and more films will be inspired by the massive and ever growing video games industry but somehow very few of them are even watchable. It doesn't matter the quality of the game being adapted. It doesn't even seem to matter how much talent is thrown at them. The recent Assassin's Creed adaption, in a quite bizarre move, hired Snowtown director Justin Kurzel who managed to bring on board Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard; the Oscar appreciated cast who were also working on his recent adaption of Macbeth.  It still landed in theatres with the feeling that it had missed the haystack and thumped hard into the cobblestones. Maybe the attempt to turn simple game plot lines into something more sophisticated is where they are going wrong?

Rampage, in contrast, is utterly, ridiculously, gloriously stupid but it fully commits to it's outlandish concept and thankfully doesn't try to undercut it with any trite attempts at seriousness or depth. The film begins with an action sequence set on a space station where an experiment by evil corporation Energyne has already gone horribly wrong causing a lab rat to turn into the size of a lion and eat most of the crew. Why would they be doing their experiments in space? Because they're illegal everywhere on Earth of course! This incident causes three canisters of experimental genetic gunk to crash-land on Earth. Of course, all three coincidentally land in the United States and all three happen to burst open in the face of some potentially dangerous animal.

This is a film where Dwayne Johnson plays a former Special Forces officer who somehow found himself becoming the head primatologist at the San Diego wildlife reserve (via time spent on an anti-poaching unit) and also learning how to parachute, pilot helicopters, master hand-to-hand combat while still finding time to hit the gym enough to become literally larger than most of the gorillas in his care. This is the kind of character who would inspire sneers of derision if played by most Hollywood leads but once again The Rock uses his super sized charm to make his character's farcical implausibility just part of the fun

Naomie Harris, coming straight from her blistering Oscar nominated turn in Moonlight, makes for a slightly more plausible geneticist even if you sometimes get the feeling that she is waiting for the cheque to clear. Together they are tasked with tracking down, not just George, but also a giant, flying wolf and an even larger spike covered crocodile. (Affectionately nicknamed Ralph and Lizzie as they are in the source arcade game.) Also searching for these increasingly large and angry monsters are the CEOs of the company who created them, keen to secure their assets and avoid wasting the results of 'Project Rampage.' (This is not a joke. The corporation literally called their experiment Project Rampage and don't seem too surprised by their accidental results. It's never made clear what their original long-term plan was for this scheme or how they pitched it to their shareholders. I really wish that board meeting was included in the film.) They come in the form of Malin Akerman's Clare Wyden (who spends the film strutting around in an all-white suit demanding her creations be brought in dead or alive like some tech-bro version of Cruella De Vil) and her dimwitted brother Brett (Jake Lacy) a clueless, overprivileged fop who is clearly riding on his smarter sister's coat-tails to success. Together they feel like such goofy pantomime villains that you half expect Wee Jimmy Krankie to pop up from behind a curtain and signal the audience to boo and hiss every time they walk on screen.

Our heroes also find themselves brushing up against a secretive government agent played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan who is clearly just having fun swaggering around with a cartoonish Texan accent and calling himself  an "ol' cowboy" at every available opportunity. At times it feels like he's simply doing a ridiculous kid-friendly version of his psychopathic Walking Dead character, Negan. None of his scenes are particularly compelling but he brings some character to the downtime while we wait for the carnage to start.

When it does start though, the film finally comes alive. Cars and tanks are tossed around like toys. Soldiers are flung around like rag dolls or eaten alive. Buildings are smashed, crushed and knocked over left, right and centre. It's all extremely violent to a degree that is sure to horrify many parents of young children in the audience (but will probably be enjoyed most by those children themselves). The death count in these final scenes probably rivals that of the grimmest of war movies but it is done with such slapstick, sadistic glee that it's hard to feel anything but a sense of anarchic joy at the chaos of it all. At a time when most superhero movies seem to feel the need to take influence from the heartbreaking images of nightmarish disasters witnessed on the news there's something pleasingly nostalgic about a film which remembers that there once was a time when watching humungous silly monsters trashing a city was considered fun. In some ways the films that Rampage most resembles is the weirder Toho Godzilla sequels released near the end of the Showa period where various men in reptilian rubber costumes tipped over model buildings regardless whether they were playing the hero or the villain this time around. In fact Rampage might be the most successful of Hollywood's recent attempts to merge the cheesy All-American action movies such as the Fast & Furious series with the often equally daft and successful Kaiju movies of Japan (In contrast, Guillermo Del Toro's similarly charming Pacific Rim feels like a much more international affair and Michael Bay's risible mecha equivalents in the Transformers series are all overlong, joyless messes)

Rampage, the arcade game was simple pleasure. Released in 1986 it was a mindless button-masher where you played as a monster and you simply have to do as much damage as possible before being turned back into an embarrassed naked human. It was amoral, childish and senselessly primitive but if you were the kind of kid who loved mindless destruction it was the best game in the arcade. Considering this, Rampage the movie may be one of the most accurate computer game films yet. It's only your own personal patience for ludicrous idiocy that will decide whether this cinema experience will feel like your inner child getting a fist bump from The Rock or just like a giant gorilla sized middle finger to your adult sensibilities.

Review by The Mogul.