Rating 2.5/5
Although I found some faults with this film, it was a somewhat enjoyable experience (maybe because it was released on my birthday). More probable is that it had just enough to keep me engaged without it meandering off in many different storylines and subplots.
As one reviewer put it, it’s something of a combination of Die Hard and The Towering Inferno. Which means, it has just enough mindless action to keep an audience entertained for 102 minutes, but not much else to make you go “Wow, that was amazing.”
Rawson Marshall Thurber wrote and directed this particular piece of movie cinema with the idea of making a summer blockbuster with a big name actor attached to it. The film does provide a spectacle and sets forth an array of action sequences. However, while it does an adequate job of creating the thrilling action scenes, it doesn’t appear to have a good grasp on setting up the major plot. Unless I just missed something along the way. I didn’t fully get the major story point until maybe half way through the film. And of course once I got it, I put the pieces together and I was back in the film. As I said earlier, I was engulfed in the film. It was that initial set up, which should have been early in the second act, that would have made it just a little more clear of why the bad guys were trying to do what they are doing.
First, before going any further, the film starts off introducing the hero Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) as a highly trained Marine and FBI agent who’s in charge of a hostage negotiation that doesn’t go as planned. The suspect sets off a bomb, killing some agents and wounding others. This is the inciting incident that sets the movie in motion. He is rushed to the hospital and meets his future wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) the doctor about to operate on him. Flash-forward several years later, we find Will married with two kids. He has lost his left leg below the knee in that earlier incident. Will now serves as a security consultant where his latest job has taken him and his family – McKenna Grace and Noah Cottrell portray his children – to Hong Kong. His job is to analyze the safety of The Pearl – a self-contained city, stretching higher into the sky within the building. It’s the design of billionaire Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han)
Of course, the audience does discover Will is being set up somehow as his former team member, Ben (Pablo Schreiber) who was also injured in the blast from the beginning of the film, receives a text message indicating he is in some way working with the bad guys.
Roland Moller plays Kores Botha, who leads his team of evil henchmen into the bulding with highly flammable chemicals to set the place on fire. Will’s wife and kids were not supposed to be there, but they have returned unexpectedly because they actually live in one of the residential units in a building that is not supposed to open yet? I guess they get to stay there because Will is the security consultant.
That’s of course the moment that Johnson springs into action to save his family. This propels the movie into the second act. In the wildly imaginative, thrilling action sequences that follow, Will uses his military training (and his prosthetic leg) in creative ways in order to get to his family and stop the evildoers.
The film moved along at a decent pace for the 102-minute runtime. The effects were believable, which added to the excitement and thrills. However, they weren’t extraordinary. It did sort of feel like Die Hard in the sense it took place in a tall building as he was trying to get to his family and bring them to safety. Something to note, though, is that Johnson, while a decent action star, didn’t quite seem to fit here. Something just felt out of place with his role. That being said, most of the leading characters (good guys and bad guys) didn’t seem to have much in character development. There wasn’t much there to make you really feel for the characters.
In all, the film did have action and effects and it kept me in just enough to be entertained for a little while, but not enough to make it remarkable.
A Writer's Voice 