If in doubt, just add fire...

I would absolutely love to be a fly on the wall in certain pitch meetings at Hollywood studios, if only just so I could get an idea of the kind of crap that doesn't get made. Just think about it for a second; for every one of those terrible, cheap-ass, knock off shit-shows that ASDA has no problem foisting on the unsuspecting public for actual currency, there has to be a whole bunch more that never got made. Incomprehensible amounts of absolute turds, floating around the system waiting for some unsuspecting exec to have a weak moment and sign off on them. On the flip side, I'd love to know how films that did make it to the screen got pitched. Take Skyscraper for example; if they didn't pitch that as Die Hard on Fire, then frankly they missed a trick. Fair play though because whatever they did do got the job done.

Being a diligent and thorough cynic, I'd simply assumed that someone had tried to reboot Die Hard, slapped The Rock into the lead role, added a prosthetic leg for some added set-piece shenanigans, substituted Hans Gruber for a bunch of interchangeable mercenaries and Skyscraper crawled from the wreckage, still slightly on fire. Turns out that isn't exactly the case, but let's be honest if the screenwriter told us he'd watched the Die Hard back to back with The Towering Inferno over and over for a 24 hour period then blasted the script out in the space of the subsequent two days, literally nobody would be surprised.

Regardless of wearing its influences heavily on its sleeve, Skyscraper isn't a bad movie at all. It's preposterous, illogical, nonsensical and all the other adjectives that 90s action movies built their foundations on, but it knows that and manages to do the other thing those movies got right; it's fun, which is arguably the most important thing.

The Rock kicks (ha! puns) things off by losing his leg trying to hostage negotiate with a redneck wearing a suicide vest and using his own son as a shield although realistically, from the angle of the blast he'd more likely need a prosthetic face, but that makes for a much more sombre and dour movie that would probably earn everyone involved an Oscar. That being one of the more off-putting possible end results, let's all just be glad the director is a director not a ballistics and explosives expert. It serves to inject his family into the plot for later purposes, as well as actually getting him into the skyscraper in the first place; a wild exposition appears (and reappears) to let The Rock and the audience know all the stuff they need to know about the world's new tallest building and the shady characters who built it. Even The Rock's slightly less maimed best mate turns out to be a douche and from that point out everything starts turning to progressively flammable shit.

This is an action flick from the 2010s, so the laws of physics are employed with a certain poetic licence, which here has the meaning of "liberally ignored". It's not quite as egregious as Fast and Furious, but if you came here for realism, there's no horse for you in this race. If you want the answer to the age old question of exactly how much use a one-legged man is in an ass kicking contest, or in a crane climbing competition, or in a jumping off said crane into a burning skyscraper competition; you're in luck. It’s perfectly OK for The Rock to be limping one minute, then racking up enough speed to launch himself improbable distances through the air. I’m not sure what they made his leg out of, but they need to start making more stuff out of it, seeing as it seems capable of holding supposedly impenetrable blast doors open without so much as a twinge. Also, I’m not sure if they were sponsored by duct tape, but the fact that it features heavily as a magical fix-all (bandage, climbing aid, sticking guns to people in bits stolen directly from Die Hard) is probably the only realistic science in the whole movie, aside from the very basic fire-science. There's all sorts of technological shenanigans too, most of which are the usual horseshit, including a hi-tech version of the hall of mirrors final fight from Enter The Dragon. It's all foreshadowed from the start, so none of it comes as a surprise but it entertains; bullets fly, faces are punched and kicked and explosions, well... explode. So far so good, no complaints from me. Well almost.

If I have any real issue, it's that there's a distinct lack of memorable bad guy. Hans Gruber is an icon now, but Skyscraper doesn't really have anything approaching that. Botha is the head of the mercs but is a fairly bog standard South African ex-military hard man with standard crap aim and a penchant for not really paying much attention to his surroundings. There's a Chinese lady who is basically vacationing from The Matrix and although she is admittedly fairly bad ass, I don't even remember if she got her name said out loud. The snivelling British Insurance Broker has the plummiest Received Pronunciation ever and is literally the least surprising double cross in the history of double crosses. That's it though, even if you include The Rock’s duplicitous former team mate. They all get their comeuppances in one way or another, but none of them are a patch on ol' Herr Gruber.

I couldn't help but enjoy Skyscraper. Props to it for its ending too, where The Rock's wife proves she isn't just kidnap fodder. In fact, now I come to think of it, she routinely demonstrates how capable she is throughout the movie and at no point did it feel like we were being force-fed awkward equality sentiments (take note please Star Wars directors, with your Social Justice Droids). It’s silly stuff and even though it may never supplant Die Hard as everybody’s favourite Christmas movie that isn’t actually a Christmas movie it’s a perfectly serviceable movie in the modern action genre. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And if you can’t fix it with duct tape, you aren’t using enough duct tape.