'Rampage' - Review

★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

Within the first ten minutes of Rampage, a giant mutant rat has downed the space station and a gorilla has given Dwayne Johnson the middle finger. What’s disappointing is that the remaining 100 minutes of this loose video game adaptation never quite live up to the ridiculousness of the opening. Johnson plays Davis Okoye, the world’s hunkiest primate specialist, who cares for the captive albino silverback, George. When aforementioned satellite comes crashing down to Earth, containers of a super-pathogen find themselves spread across America: in an alligator swamp, amongst a pack of wolves, and in George’s enclosure. Once exposed, George, a ‘gator and the alpha wolf begin an inexorable growth to giant size, possessed of remarkable genetic traits such as advanced regeneration or - in the case of the wolf - the ability to fly.

With all three headed on a collision course (George escapes captivity and becomes a target, much to Davis’ horror), it’s not hard to see where this will all end up. The Rock re-teams with San Andreas director Brad Peyton here, and the general attitude of their previous work has transferred well. Peyton wields Johnson’s uncrackable charisma like a sword of pure charm, and helps sell our musclebound hero’s interaction with the unfortunate George (portrayed in the early stages of the film through motion capture). Naomie Harris costars as Kate Caldwell, a discredited geneticist who tags along to unload handy exposition. To the films credit, she’s not a love interest and is clearly much smarter than Davis, but is sidelined by Peyton’s alternating devotion to Johnson in a tight t-shirt and the sight of George punching a giant wolf in the face. A sight which, if we’re all being honest, is what we’ve paid for.

The argument always levelled at the critics when movies like this inevitably fail to draw great write-ups is “you’re just supposed to turn your brain off and enjoy it”. For once, I agree with them...to a certain extent. Though the onanism of this genre’s usual suspects (Bay, McG, Snyder) is absent, Rampage still retains a total disregard for civilian casualties (the stunningly realistic toppling of a massive Chicago skyscraper is very disquieting), plus that very odd Transformers loophole where the military’s combined attempts to fell a giant monster consistently fail, yet Davis and his gorilla buddy alone are enough to trump them.

Which brings us to Malin Akerman’s villain and her pet brother (Jake Lacey). They’re multimillionaires who plan to reap huge amounts of money at the expense of the civilian population, also falling prey to an investigation by the authorities(!). Their introduction does bring everything to a screeching halt, but it says a lot that we’ve now reached the point where villains who - barely five years ago - would have been dismissed as caricatures now appear real enough that we delight in their downfall. That we’ve no sympathy for them at all is unsurprising, but how much we feel for the unfortunate George is a welcome shock, at least until he becomes responsible for most of the debris. 

This final section of the movie (during which everything and everyone falls down or blows up at least three times) is undeniably entertaining, even if it doesn’t quite give into its premise with total abandon: introducing a growth- enhancing MacGuffin and The Rock in the same movie yet never uniting the two feels like a missed opportunity. Nevertheless, for a film where someone literally says “Thanks for saving the world”, it’s never two minutes shy of a good guffaw, cheap thrills or, at the very least, an expensive demolition display.