Why ‘Skyscraper’ Feels Like a Movie Out of Time

AB Gray
Movies
Movies

The old anecdote goes that Die Hard screenwriter Steven De Souza once had someone pitch a movie to him as “Die Hard… in a building”. We’ll never know who came up with such an original idea, but it might as well have been the creators of new Dwayne Johnson movie Skyscraper, an old school disaster movie with its head in the clouds and a high concept that’s 3500ft above sea level.

If it wasn’t for the impressive CGI and the appearance of Johnson — the very model of modern masculinity — you’d swear blind that Skyscraper was a movie that you’d seen before in the 1990s, maybe one you’d half-watched while drunk at 12.30am, possibly starring Christopher Lambert or Christian Slater. Right? The one with the big building! And the terrorists! You know: Skyscraper!

ROCK HARD

Just another ordinary commute to the office for Dwayne Johnson

Skyscraper is a glorious throwback to better days; the era of action movies where heroes shot first, quipped second and cared very little for collateral damage or carbon footprint. Action movies have had to mature since the millennium: screen heroes have got smarter, faster, less muscly and more socially conscious. Matt Damon is an action hero. Liam Neeson is an action hero. Hell, even Benedict Cumberbatch is an action hero. Put simply, the age of the oiled-up, muscle-bound, Portaloo-sized action hero is over. Kaput. Finito. At least, it would be were it not for Dwayne Johnson, the man known affectionately as ‘The Rock’ due to him being roughly the same size as Alcatraz Island.

Johnson is the exception to the rule. He is a walking, talking, weight-lifting, tequila-slamming anomaly. A man who makes action moves at least two decades out of style and still makes money like it’s going out of fashion. Think back to Welcome to the Jungle (aka The Rundown), when Arnold Schwarzenegger literally handed Johnson the action hero baton. It felt like a symbolic transition at the time, but Arnie knew the plates were shifting: mainstream audiences would soon only tolerate the golden age of action heroes in Expendables movies and ironic cameos. Johnson, however, wasn’t having any of that. He’s been on a one-man crusade ever since to keep the old-school action era alive, and if that means making Die Hard knock-offs and disaster flicks and obscure videogame movies, then so be it.

The Rock plays Will Sawyer, the most electrifying man in skyscraper security analysis. He’s essentially a risk assessment nerd — a clipboard-carrying killjoy — but because The Rock is a gigantic action behemoth, Will Sawyer will snap approximately 38 terrorist spines on his risk assessing adventures. We’ve all seen the shot of Johnson running and jumping into the flaming building, and no one seems to have any problem with the fact that The Rock has the size and approximate speed of a milk float. See also: San Andreas, in which all 26 square feet of Dwayne Johnson was squeezed into a tiny rescue helicopter. We didn’t question the feats of strength performed by Schwarzenegger and Stallone in the ’80s and ’90s, so why wouldn’t we suspend our disbelief when Johnson holds a bridge together with his bare hands in 2018? Logic is for losers.

OUT OF TIME

The entire movie is teeming with ’90s action movie archetypes. Vaguely foreign terrorists straight out of Air Force One are smart enough to plan an elaborate heist but can’t land a single bullet on our barn-door sized hero. Noah Taylor plays a sneering businessman like he’s channeling Jeremy Irons as Scar in The Lion King. The aforementioned money shot from the trailer, of Johnson making an impossible leap from “super crane” to skyscraper, is pure Cliffhanger. And the Will Sawyer action figure comes complete with Emotional Back Story and Removable Leg; a humanising affliction that brings to mind Bruce Willis wandering through Die Hard with bare, bloody feet.

You have to think that director Rawson Marshall Thurber knew exactly what kind of movie he was making, because to make a movie this cheesy and over-the-top by accident would be quite the feat. As far as the filmmakers, cast and characters of Skyscraper are concerned, the past 25 years never happened; the film is set in a world where skyscrapers are still considered gawp-worthy, to be gazed upon with both awe and fear.

We’re told, by several characters, that the movie’s titular structure, Hong Kong tower The Pearl, is the most high-tech building in the world, but the crappy tourist trap at the top is basically a glorified hall of mirrors like something you’d find in London’s Trocadero circa 1993. Security panels are located externally (definitely logical), housed behind giant turbines that rotate just slowly enough for humans to jump through. The building might be controlled by face recognition and iPads and palm-print technology, but the tropes are as old and rusty as the bare bones of Nakatomi Plaza. It came as no surprise when the movie’s marketing department released two new, old posters: one styled deliberately after Die Hard, another the Towering Inferno. Spiritually, Skyscraper is a movie from another time.

MILE-HIGH SORE THUMB

Official: Dwayne Johnson in... DIE SHARD

If you needed further proof of Skyscraper‘s temporal displacement, consider the fact that it is an American-made movie set in a very tall building that catches fire, and yet I haven’t seen a single person make comparisons to 9/11 or accuse the movie of bad taste. That’s because the tone of Skyscraper is so unashamedly ’90s — so deeply rooted in a more innocent time, when big buildings were awesome and terrorists were beardy Europeans — that it feels like it pre-dates the events of September 11th. That’s no accident: a deliriously retro throwback, Skyscraper sticks out like a mile-high sore thumb compared to other modern action blockbusters. It turns out Die Hard In A Building wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

AB Gray
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