New Release Review: Skyscraper

Skyscraper

(2018. Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber. Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell, Chin Han)

Synopsis: Building Systems expert and military veteran Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) has just completed his assessment of The Pearl, a newly finished 225 storey skyscraper in Hong Kong. When a fire starts to blaze out of control, he finds his family are in great peril. It then becomes a race against time to save them as the conflagration consumes the building.

Skyscraper is definitely a disaster movie but is far from a disaster of a movie. It has frequently been compared to Die Hard (1988), but a much better basis for comparison would be The Towering Inferno (1974). Rawson Thurber, a director with very little pedigree has taken a big budget studio picture and delivers a tense, exciting take on the genre that is in line with modern, Chinese sensibilities.

A disaster movie is generally not about the catastrophe itself. It is more about the human reaction to calamity. It’s essential in these films to lovingly render this threat but in many ways it’s the ultimate farce, throwing real people into unreal situations. And this is where Skyscraper really shows us what it’s got.

Nearly everything about this movie is put together in a thoughtful and carefully planned manner. The structure is very nearly a textbook example of how-to “Show, Not Tell”. All the elements that will later prove to be important in the film are laid out in the opening montage. The film tells you what it is about and what will be important, but not why they will be important and each of these elements are then brought to the fore in a subtle and natural transition. The editing is smoothly done and flows from one scene to another giving you a great sense of place. Stunts are played in the style of Indiana Jones rather than Captain America (i.e. it’s the grit of the protagonists that carries them through rather than “movie-magic muscles”.)

The casting is spot-on: Will and Sarah Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson and Neve Campbell) are understated but with a note of controlled panic, avoiding scenery chewing histrionics. Pablo Schrieber (Orange is the New Black, American Gods, Den of Thieves) appears early in the film, which is always a fantastic sign of things to come. McKenna Roberts, the child actress making her debut playing Will Sawyer’s daughter, Georgia, is a great discovery and another enhancement to the film. In the finest traditions of disaster movies we also need human antagonists to show the true danger. Danish actor Roland Moller (Atomic Blonde) is effective as the South African terrorist, Karles Botha and enjoys a hat tip to his real nationality (“I think he’s Scandinavian”). He is ably supported by Hannah Quinlivan, who is a joy to watch portraying a terrifying, ice-cold operator and with an on-screen edge of steely danger.

So, where does the film fall down? It would maybe be silly to complain about typical action movie physics, fire suppression systems working in a way completely divorced from reality or, of course, the implausibility of The Rock’s ludicrous upper body and grip strength. Some plot elements are mediocre and appear to be inserted solely to allow more screen-time for the Mandarin-speaking cast. Byron Mann (Altered Carbon, The Big Short) and Elfina Luk (iZombie, Blood and Water) are criminally under-utilised as police officers Wu and Han. They join Neve Campbell in a fairly irrelevant “B-plot” and seem to mainly exist to be thrown off-guard at the idea that white people can speak Cantonese.

Why add such extraneous elements to a film? Well, if you’ve ever wondered about why so many films nowadays have Shanghai as a key location and plot element, wonder no longer. The Chinese market was worth $7.9 billion in US dollars in 2017 with the US and Canada totalling just $11.1 billion (which was in part due to a rise in ticket prices) and China are building up to twenty-five new cinema screens a day. Add to this the fact that there is a limited quota of films allowed to be screened at all in China and suddenly a lot of things make sense. If you want access to a market that is rapidly growing to challenge that of the Northern Americas then you’d best make sure that your film is one of the lucky 34 per year which get shown. Ready Player One, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Tomb Raider all had much bigger debuts in China than they did domestically, eventually representing about 75% of the cash value of the North American market. (Not only that, with lower ticket prices, you know you’re reaching more eyeballs which has knock on effects for DVD and merchandising sales). 

Cinema is a truly international medium and, as Hollywood targets audiences outside of it’s traditional market, this means that we’re now getting films that wouldn’t previously have been made with people that wouldn’t previously have seen screen time. Representation of significant portions of the world population to better reflect the cinema-going public means that we will see stories that might never otherwise have been released. For lovers of stories and cinema this looks like a win.

Speaking of representation, it’s interesting to see that the set up of the film features the protagonist, Will Sawyer, losing his leg in an explosion. It may have been better to have an actor who actually had a similar disablity play the part, but the way the film handled this aspect was surprisingly thoughtful and considerate and made it less of a “gimmick” than it could have been. Sawyer isn’t portrayed as pitiful (as disabled characters unfortunately often are); he’s an action hero who grits his teeth and soldiers on. It’s not played for comedy or cheap sight gags as other lesser films have done, but you are reminded of it and the prosthetic does seem to create definite limitations for Sawyer. (Even if he does use it for some clever problem solving at one point.)

So, Skyscraper is an enjoyable, if typical disaster movie marketed with one eye on the Chinese market. It aims for international spectacle and thankfully often succeeds.

Review by The Guildmaster.