Flirting charmingly with disaster

Johnson Thomas

It’s near-date to the 30th birthday of the Bruce Willis crowd-pleaser Die Hard and we are being treated to a similar disaster affectionate Skyscraper that seems like a faltering hybrid of  The Towering Inferno and the former. Here, The Rock-Dwayne Johnson as Will Ford, a former FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader and US war veteran, who has now moved on to being a security expert for skyscrapers, stands firm and indestructible despite a prosthetic foot and a hulking muscular body. There’s no slowing this heavyweight down – not even gravity can pull him to earth when he goes about his business of saving his family from a fired-out tower thrice the height of the Empire state building, denoted as the tallest in the world, built and designed by a Chinese hotshot Zhao Long Zhi (Chin Han) with underworld antecedents and located in Hong Kong. You even get to see him hanging from his fingers of one hand, on a ledge near a glass window some 200 storey high. We’ve come to believe in the movie lore that surrounds him I guess. Why else would one be thoroughly gravitated to an entirely fictional fantasy, digitally charged disaster movie that looks and feels so flaky and impossible?  

Thurber’s script is below par, the villain doesn’t appear to have death-defying motivation to engineer such callous mayhem and the storyline appears to have little going for it. But one thing writer-director Thurber does is make Will Ford a character that we easily empathise with. 

From the opening scene drama where Ford loses a leg and his confidence, to getting married to a Navy Officer, fathering twins and a strong bond therein, we believe in the transition of a lonely workaholic to that of a devoted family man. And that’s where the crux of likeability for this flaky endeavour lies. Dwayne Johnson brings earnestness and honesty to the role despite the sheer ridiculousness of the action on show here. We know its inhuman for a hulk of his size to go about successfully engaging in death defying aerial stunts as shown in the film but we still don’t mind the lack of scientific backing in that perfidy.  

The building itself is a shining, self-contained city, stretching 200-plus stories into the clouds. When Ford does his security check we see the possibilities of where the action could lead and when characters stand around and provide painfully clunky expository dialogue detailing the building’s many high-tech features, it becomes all the more certain. The camera does the rest—going up and down in dizzying spells and intermittently sprucing it up with firepower and stunt-action so there’s enough of an adrenaline gush to excite and amaze. This may not be a great film but it’s a thoroughly engaging one!