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| Rampage - yes, it's exactly what you expect |
Rampage
I have to confess, I love giant monster movies. That's why one of my all-time favorite arcade games is Rampage. I remember the first time I saw it in the mid-1980s. You get to play a giant monster on a rampage. Unlike most multiplayer arcade games where you either fight the other players (Street Fighter) or cooperate with them to achieve a goal (Gauntlet), Rampage had no rules it was a giant sandbox of buildings to destroy, helicopters to smash, and people to eat. You want to attack the other monsters? You can. You want to go around stomping on cars? You can do that too. It was an unapologetic homage to films like King Kong and Godzilla - there was no deeper meaning to it.
And that is what makes Rampage so great, or terrible depending on your point of view. It may very well be the best movie adaptation of a video game yet (a low bar I know). It promises very little. There will be the three classic monsters from the game, Lizzie the giant lizard, Ralph the giant wolf, and George the giant gorilla, and they will rampage and destroy stuff. And like the video game, it delivers exactly that. No more, no less.
Well, that's not entirely true - it delivers a little more - Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as a primatologist (stop laughing!), a shady genetics research company that might as well be the same one from the Jurassic Park movies, and a bunch of other forgettable characters. Actually it's a little better than that - the giant monsters are actually created using CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) or the latest "genetic editing" technique en vogue - so points to the film for injecting some actual science fiction, and while the acting is mostly bad but unimportant, except for Dwayne Johnson's trademark one-liners, it's worth mentioning that Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a real standout as a government agent that freely admits he's an a-hole.
I could go into more detail, but any more I tell you will just spoil what little plot there is. And make no mistake the plot is not bad - just simple. Like the video game. And for some of us, that's good enough. Now shut up - Tokyo, New York, London, San Francisco, D.C., and L.A. get destroyed all the time. It's time to see a bunch of giant monsters rampaging through Chicago.
***1/2 out of *****
And that is what makes Rampage so great, or terrible depending on your point of view. It may very well be the best movie adaptation of a video game yet (a low bar I know). It promises very little. There will be the three classic monsters from the game, Lizzie the giant lizard, Ralph the giant wolf, and George the giant gorilla, and they will rampage and destroy stuff. And like the video game, it delivers exactly that. No more, no less.
Well, that's not entirely true - it delivers a little more - Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as a primatologist (stop laughing!), a shady genetics research company that might as well be the same one from the Jurassic Park movies, and a bunch of other forgettable characters. Actually it's a little better than that - the giant monsters are actually created using CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) or the latest "genetic editing" technique en vogue - so points to the film for injecting some actual science fiction, and while the acting is mostly bad but unimportant, except for Dwayne Johnson's trademark one-liners, it's worth mentioning that Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a real standout as a government agent that freely admits he's an a-hole.
I could go into more detail, but any more I tell you will just spoil what little plot there is. And make no mistake the plot is not bad - just simple. Like the video game. And for some of us, that's good enough. Now shut up - Tokyo, New York, London, San Francisco, D.C., and L.A. get destroyed all the time. It's time to see a bunch of giant monsters rampaging through Chicago.
***1/2 out of *****
I could go into more detail, but any more I tell you will just spoil what little plot there is. And make no mistake the plot is not bad - just simple. Like the video game. And for some of us, that's good enough. Now shut up - Tokyo, New York, London, San Francisco, D.C., and L.A. get destroyed all the time. It's time to see a bunch of giant monsters rampaging through Chicago.
***1/2 out of *****
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