"If you can't fix it with duct tape ... you ain't using enough duct tape."
Hello everyone!
So by now you've probably noticed I have a thing for Dwayne Johson's movies.
Or at least his recent ones, though I have to admit that the Scorpion King was also an entertaining thing to watch, way back when.
More to the point, however, the Rock just brings something to his movies that I don't often see with other actors, and that's saying something.
So a week or so ago, I managed to start tonight's blog topic.
And by start I mean I watched about half an hour (maybe twenty minutes) before my sister decided I needed to focus my attention on her. I can watch the movie later, right?
Right!
So then this weekend I FINALLY managed to sit down and finish this thing.
It's called Skyscraper, and no, Demi Lovato doesn't have a cameo in it.
I'll be honest: every time I see the title I start singing out Lovato's song. It's been hard-wired into my brain, not that I know WHY. Maybe it's a connection I haven't seen before but it's trying to tell me something?
Could be.
In any event, while I'm wrestling to get out of the song lyrics, I'll remind you that any other of my Rock movies will be listed down below, or at least the most recent ones will be, as I've seen and recapped quite a bit of them by this point in time.
On to the actual movie now!
Will Sawyer (Johnson) and his gang of misfits (aka the special ops military unit that helps out the FBI when they need it) go in hot for this hostage situation and it looks like it might even end okay, until the point where they realize the guy holding his family hostage made a suicide vest and is also holding his son on top of everything else.
Will's second, Ben, says he has a clear shot, but shooting might trigger the bomber to twitch and hit the kill switch for the bomb, so Will nixes the idea.
Not that it matters because the bomb goes boom anyway - sadly, with everything else in close vicinity.
Will survives, saved by surgeon and resident miracle worker Sarah (Neve Campbell), and during the course of his recovery the two fall in love, get married, and have two children together. On a side note, while Will DID survive, he unfortunately lost both his legs below the knees, but he's since learned to cope and switched careers.
He's now a security expert taking good, hard looks at any kind of potentially dangerous environment before it's opened to the people, and his latest project is situated in Hong Kong.
The Pearl.
Sadly, not the ship we've all learned to love since she first sailed onto screens back in 2003, this is a big ass skyscraper (yes, the one from the title), the tallest building in the world, and its creator, Zhao (Chin Han), wants to open up the residential areas, FINALLY.
But he needs a security assessment first, and do you remember Ben from earlier? Well, he gets Will the job, and Will is more than happy to take it. He's also happy to have his family along with him for the ride, though of course things won't be as easy-peasy as they sound right about now.
They start going wrong from the very first; Henry, Will's son, isn't feeling well, so Sarah and Georgia (Will's daughter) return to their apartment with him. Meanwhile, Will is headed off-Pearl with a tablet that gives him instant access to all the security measures, and Ben's with him, when they're attacked and Will's bag is stolen.
Luckily, however, he put the tablet in his pocket earlier - not that he'd call it luck when Ben pulls a gun on his one-time commander.
And after the Rock throws him around a little (after getting thrown around himself and I'm sitting there going COME ON JOHNSON U GOT THIS), the gun goes off between them, mortally wounding Ben, but he manages to wheeze out that the Pearl is going down.
Say what now? With Will's family INSIDE IT?
Nu-uh.
Daddy's gotta go to work.
Ignoring my Fast and Furious throwback, Will evades both the bad guys that're after him and the tablet - losing the tablet in the process, sadly - and the police who somehow decide he's one of the bad guys, too. But he's too late to actually get to the Pearl before all hell breaks loose.
Back inside the building, a man named Botha has set a fire right underneath the residential area, and it's time for Sarah and the kids to hightail it out of there.
It's also time for Will's face to be plastered on the news - dang these people work fast! - as wanted in the current Pearl situation, and considering he is the only 6 foot 5, bald, tattooed, dark-skinned person for MILES, a sore thumb would literally stick out less than he does in this crowd.
But he's off towards the Pearl, inside which Zhao is being convinced to hightail it out of there, though he's confident the anti-fire measures will kick into place.
They might have, if the off-sight security facility hadn't been breached, a hacker employed to make sure nothing was working right, and the Pearl became the world's tallest chimney, encouraging the fire to keep going up.
So Zhao and his team head out towards the chopper, not that they make it - sadly, their pilot apparently met some sort of untimely end, and Botha is there because he wants a drive Zhao has in his possession. Some quick thinking and action later, and Zhao plus drive are in his panic room that not even a nuke would be able to bring down, so Botha's out of options.
Unless he gets Will's family, because remember Will?
Yeah, he got himself into the building.
How?
Well, it's a long story. The short version of it, however, is that, with the police right on his tail, he climbed the crane next to the Pearl, tried hooking to it, failed, and then just jumped from point A to point B. Dominic Toretto, wherever he is, is leading the applause. Good job, Hobbs!
And as a stereotypical Asian thing, all these exploits are featured on a big screen so everyone down below can watch, real time.
So, alright. Zhao's locked in, Will's in the building on the hunt for his family, and Sarah and the kids are currently stuck in the Pearl's central park, where not only the fire has already reached, but apparently Lara Croft gave Bryce (Noah Taylor) the boot so he went bad, because in this movie he wants to shoot the good guys.
Not to worry, Will is on the job, but while he manages to get his wife and son into a free-falling elevator (which will hopefully break once she hits said breaks), he needs to go get his daughter, too.
And that's when things get hairy, because Botha's after both of them now.
He manages to separate them and threaten to throw Georgia off the Pearl if Will doesn't bring him Zhao's drive, so, by ingenuity and a shit-ton of duct tape, Will manages to Spiderman his way to the place where he can reopen the doors to Zhao's shelter. He's also incredibly fast-moving for someone on just one leg as the doors start closing again, but even though Zhao tries the whole I-have-you-at-gunpoint thing, the two end up coming to an agreement and exit to go grab Georgia.
Not that it goes smoothly, because when has ANYTHING ever gone smoothly more than 200 stories high?
Zhao doesn't want to give up the disk - it's got all the names of Botha's associates, which he pilfered after setting trackers onto the money he gave Botha when the guy initially came threatening so Zhao could even build, and the names (and account numbers) of all the bad guys are his insurance policy.
Zhao and Will lead Botha to the weird room with mirrors where you never know where anyone is, proven to a T when Botha thinks Will is in front of him when he's actually behind.
Botha goes kablam through a hole, while the fire starts reaching critical point and poor Zhao is also a little wounded right now. So it looks like the trio will meet hell in heaven.
But wait!
Remember Sarah and Henry?
They managed to get down with the elevator safely, and Sarah immediately establishes a rapport with Inspector Wu (Byron Mann), aka when he and his subordinate are chittering away in their native language, Sarah chitters right back.
Surprise! Not all us whiteys are stupid.
Together, they realize that Botha and his people are going to parachute off the Pearl (and I can only say Captain Sparrow did it first, in reverse), and with Sarah's help in determining the landing point, they marshal a force to bring the gunfight to the rest of the bad guys left on the ground. This almost get Sarah killed since, despite obeying Wu and staying in the car, she ends up getting into a fist fight in there, but honking brings Wu around just in time to make a mental note never to be on Sarah's bad side.
She packs a nasty kick.
But in the process of this, they recover Will's stolen tablet, and Sarah's able to get to the secuirty mainframe, but the system doesn't want to cooperate.
So, remembering a lesson her husband taught her at the beginning of the movie - rebooting basically almost always works - she does exactly that and reboots the entire Pearl.
Eureka! IT WORKS!
The anti-fire systems come back on and within a minute the Pearl goes from Olympic torch to smoking chimney cooling off, much to Wu's amazement.
This does, however, enable Zhao, Will and Georgia to hitch a chopper ride to the ground, where the family happily embrace and, while Zhao decides to rebuild, I think that Will is going to be happiest when he can just go home and take a long shower.
FIN
Perhaps not as funny as the Rock's usual creations, it had some creative solutions with his character's prosthetic legs (hanging off a building while holding on to one? Sure, why not), and there was still just enough humour to keep it real. The supporting cast did its job well, but really, if it weren't for the Rock, this movie might have tanked completely.
Though I will say this: if I ever open the door and he's standing there asking me if I'd let him renovate my place, I'll kindly tell him HELL NO BROTHA and close the door!
xx
*poster and video not mine, screencaps by me
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