Rampage

Rampage

Starring Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman

Directed by Brad Peyton

The Story:
Evil corporation Energyne, led by sister-and-brother team Claire (Malin Akerman) and Brett (Jake Lacy) have been conducting experiments in space regarding animals, causing in one animal to go wild and attack the crew.  As the debris fall, three canisters land in different parts of America.  One is eaten by a crocodile, and a wolf is subjected to another.

Meanwhile, Primatologist Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson) is tending to a rare albino gorilla named George in the San Diego Zoo, when George comes into contact with a canister.  He grows larger and becomes more aggressive, and genetic engineer Dr. Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris) arrives to tell Davis that George was subjected to Energyne's chemicals, and that she can find a cure for him.

Claire devises a plan to bring her creations back to Chicago, and sends a call for her monsters to come home.  George, the wolf, and the crocodile converge on Chicago while Davis and Kim - with OGA agent Harvey Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) - try to rescue George and keep the government from releasing the MOAB bomb on the city.

The Synopsis:
In 1986, the video game "Rampage" became a huge hit for kids who swarmed to the arcade (remember those places?) to deposit their hard-earned quarters and play for hours, where they get to play monsters who used to be humans devour cities after coming into contact with experiments by an evil corporation.  The game spawned several sequels that made their way to console gaming, and pretty much no one ever expected a game like this to be made into a big-budget action-adventure.

However, you should never say never, as director Brad Peyton (who also directed "San Andreas" also about destruction of a city, also starring Dwayne Johnson, also featuring Johnson flying a helicopter) decided to bring these giant monsters to the big screen, and while the visuals were impressive enough, there wasn't anything else really solid with the film - basically, it's alright, but nothing to write home about.

Dwayne Johnson - the hardest working man in show business - commands the screen as primatologist Davis Okoye, who's been taking care of gorilla George since birth.  Johnson plays the typical Johnson character here, and you can't help but love the muscle-bound jock for being playing to his strengths, which basically only includes giving one-liners and flexing his muscles.  Johnson is one of the most relatable action stars today, and his presence alone gives credence to the film as what it is portrayed to be - an all-out city-destroying monster movie.  Yet even his character isn't given much to go on, as we find out he doesn't like working with people (yet he gleefully works with people at the beginning of the film) because he experienced war and stuff, and he wouldn't recommend it. 

"Rampage" tries to tell a story, but it falls as flat as any generic action-blockbuster from the 80s that weren't memorable then and most certainly aren't now.  Naomie Harris has a strong back story, but we never get a fully developed tale from her.  Jeffrey Dean Morgan has spent way too much time playing Negan on "The Walking Dead," because his character here is almost a carbon copy of the antihero (we just needed him to don a jacket and a barbed wire bat and we'd find Negan's true origin story).  Then there's the laughably caricature-written villains in Malin Akerman and Jake Lacey, who give away Boris and Natasha (from "Rocky & Bullwinkle") vibes as Akerman's Claire is the icy, cold-as-steel villain who's crafting giant monsters because...reasons?...and Lacey is Brett, Claire's bumble-headed brother/sidekick who has about as many brain cells as fingers on his right hand.  Demetrius Grosse plays Colonel Blake, who is every Colonel ever in an action movie all rolled into one - when faced with the most obvious answer, he instead resorts to sending in wave after wave of military soldiers to their doom, then calling on the biggest bomb ever to go "boom" and end this mild inconvenience.  

Surprisingly, it's George who gets the biggest character arc, and becomes the only character worth caring about at all (minus the fact that he looks a lot like Ron Perlman...no offense, but I mean, he really does!).

While the majority of the film is muddled with exposition and bland character development, when the monsters finally hit Chicago, you see the full carnage they unleash.  Buildings fall like match sticks, and stories-tall monsters attack each other - and Dwayne Johnson stands in the middle of them all, and for the first time in his career he appears smaller than his co-stars.  It's almost laughable when he joins George to take down the other two monsters, as if he could even scratch one of the other monsters before they eat him in one gulp.

The Summary:
When it comes to an action blockbuster, "Rampage" works well enough in its final forty-five minutes, but it's the hour before that drags on and leaves you impatiently tapping your foot until the monsters get to wreak havoc.  Better to watch this at home and fast forward to the best part - the ending.

The Score: B-