Skyscraper: It's no Die Hard but is worth the climb. While many will get hung up on the physics and believitability of Dwayne Johnson jumping from a crane and him being able to climb 100 stories and not be out of breath, they are all forgetting one important thing; He's DWAYNE 'THE ROCK' JOHNSON!!! He can do anything and make it look easy. Any movie he touches automatically starts with a 2 star rating solely based on his innate magnetism. Everything he touches turns to gold. Try to name one movie that he has made that is truly awful. Go ahead I'll wait ... That's because you can't. Sure there are flaws in Skyscraper, mainly almost every scene without Johnson, but so does every blockbuster movie these days. If your looking for a fun exciting crowd pleaser, Skyscraper is for you. B
Dwayne said it himself on SNL, he truly is ‘Franchise
Viagra’. While many have panned Baywatch as a terrible movie and dismal first
weekend numbers, one has to think what would have happened had Johnson not been
in the movie. Now that would be a true bomb. It will easily make its money back
and even go into the black with its world-wide release. And the flaws, which
are apparent, are solely based on writing and directing problems. Everything
Dwayne Johnson touches in the film is gold with the one exception being a
nonsensical expositional run Mitch takes at the beginning of the film. Zack Efron
on the other hand is very hot and cold, only hitting his stride when he
unexplainably changes from the preppy entitled millennial that he is accustomed
to playing into the genuine sidekick he needs to be. In the beginning the
writers seem to want to push both Johnson and Efron on the same level and it
isn't until the middle of the film that they realize how much of a mistake that
was. No one is on Johnson's level. They then delegate him to side kick where he
belongs and the film finally takes off. There are amazing bodies and crude
humor throughout to keep you interested but only when everyone realizes their
role can you really sink into the Baywatch world. Once there, it's a one-way
trip back to the nineties with bouncing bodies, lifeguards performing too much
police work and local corruption. You can just smell the nostalgia. CJ Parker
is delegated to a more minor role than in the show due to the lesser acting
chops of Kelly Rohrbach. those chops are picked up by Alexandra Daddario as
Summer Quinn who is only hampered by her forced relationship to Efron. She
continues to benefit from her association with Johnson and is starting to come
into her own with superb comedic timing, dramatis and amazing good looks. Get a
new director and the sequel can't come soon enough.
Good bye Rock, hello Dwayne Johnson. The man has
finally arrived. No longer can it be said that the days of true movie stardom
are behind us because Johnson has somehow tapped into the reservoirs of old and
burst on the scene as the next big thing. While you might be asking, but he
already is a movie star and he already was the highest paid actor in Hollywood
for 2016, you would be right. My answer to you is less, he did all those
things, but not until Fate of the Furious has he shown his true potential of elevating
every scene he is in to good, borderline great movie making. And that is an
increasingly more difficult task to do with the ridiculous excess of the Fast
and the Furious franchise. The single sequence that is cringeworthy that has
been discussed ad nauseam is the interaction between Johnson and Jason Statham
discussing their pasts, threatening each other and then laughing and accepting
one another. This is the dilemma that the Fast series keeps running into of
terrible dialogue and over the top action sequences. If you remove Johnson from
the film it is an absolute dumpster fire of trash but with him he elevates it
to the third best in the series. The sheer ridiculousness of the film is
getting more and more difficult to accept and based on the US box office take,
it appears that people may finally be wising up to it. Since Furious 4 they
simply have been trying to one up the last movie and they finally may have one
upped to far for even the most diehard fans. Don't get me wrong, the film will make
over a billion dollars and there will be a ninth, but maybe now the critics and
fans are wising up to what they are actually watching. Cars and explosions. By
the standard of movie definition, the critics should hate this franchise just
like they hate everything that Michael Bay comes up, with which they should.
Somehow Vin Diesel has been bullet proof when it comes to his precious car
universe. Hopefully we are finally seeing some chinks in the armor.
Fate of the Furious has the Gang fighting against
themselves when Cipher (Charlize Theron) randomly shows up at the beginning of
the film and shows Dom (Vin Diesel) some information that will motivate him to
completely betray his entire 'family' that they have spent the last 6 films
(Tokyo Drift excluded) building towards you never turn your back on family. The
main question I have at this point is what the heck kind of skills does this
team of car racers have that no one else in the world have? They keep getting
pulled into these amazing, world ending scenarios and all they can do is drive
cars really fast. When did Tej Parker (Ludicrous) become this ultimate hacker
able to defeat the world’s most dangerous hacker? The only member of the team
that actually has their talents introduced and explained is Ramesy (Nathalie
Emmanuel) and that’s only because she created the 'God's Eye' program and was
introduced in the last film. Everyone else just picks up these amazing talents
whenever the plot needs them to. And the plot needs them to pull things out of
thin air a lot. Since when could thousands of cars be hacked and then driven
and inserted with autopilots, creating a drone car army? Or be able to do
anything with a nuclear football without all the codes from the different
people that MOVIES THEMSELVES have taught us they need? Or anyone be able to
hack into a NUCLEAR SUBMARINE and drive it remotely? Or completely remove the
nuclear fallout from detonated nuclear missiles by simply removing an
electronic chip? That uranium doesn't just go away. And all of this is made
actually entertaining by the charm and charisma or Dwayne Johnson. Whenever he
is not on screen or in the background, the film is laughable and boring. The
main lesson here is that Johnson was right to beef with Diesel over screen time
because he absolutely save this film from being a clunker. 2 ½ pipes out of
4.
Let it be known right now that I think the Fast and the Furious franchise is turning into the new Saw franchise, they just don’t know when to stop. And with the ending of Fast Five it is quite obvious that they will be making a 6th. I did not go into Fast Five with my hopes high but even the low standards I was expecting were barely met. There were numerous problems with the plot and with the realism of the movie. The story begins with explaining how Ex FBI agent Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) and Mia Toretto break Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) out of prison which is unrealistic to begin with. It also shows again the bad decision making of O’Connor that has plagued him throughout the entire series and makes you wonder why anyone keeps following his decisions. After a heist goes wrong the group starts a war with the Crime boss of Rio and also move themselves to the top of the most wanted list which brings in Federal Agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to hunt down Toretto. In order to bring down the Crime boss, they have to bring in Tyrese Gybson , Ludacris and others from the previous Fast and Furious’, which again brings in Han Lue which again must make this a prequel to Tokyo Drift. Another fact for the case that Tokyo Drift should never have been made despite it being the best one of the series. the only way this movie was saved and not total hogwash was that it had The Rock in it and had some pretty cool car chases, albeit unrealistic car chases. The acting was mediocre at best and Diesel can’t decide if he wants to be the serious bad boy that he has been the entire series or try and become more of a nice family man which does not fit him at all.
