Runtime: 1 hour, 47 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Brad Peyton
Quick Impressions:
I liked this movie.
We finally saw Rampage Thursday night (since we’re saving Avengers: Infinity War for a family outing this weekend), and because we got to it so late, I’m aware its reviews have not been exactly glowing. (I haven’t read the reviews, but I’ve seen numbers on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. As time passes, those are pretty hard to avoid.)
To critics who didn’t like it, I want to ask, “What were you expecting?” and, “Have you ever played Rampage?”
It’s an old arcade game where you pick one of three monsters, then attempt to level a city before those pesky Army guys can stop you. When I was in third grade, my little sister and I used to play pretty often in the arcade at the hotel where my dad worked. Most of the time, Mom agreed to let us “play without quarters” (i.e. mash buttons and watch the game go through various demos while we pretended we were in control) (a strategy which nicely prepared me for adult life). On the very rarest of occasions, we’d wheedle a few quarters from our indulgent father, and I would play a little Rampage for real. The experience was almost identical (except I lasted longer without quarters). Whether you’re playing with quarters or without, you imagine you’re a big monster smashing up the city, and…
We’re not talking about global thermonuclear war or even a nice game of chess. If there is a cerebral sophistication to Rampage, it was totally lost on eight-year-old me. And this movie is not sophisticated either. In any way. At all.
I feel Rampage the movie is designed to be played without quarters. That is, The Rock does all the cool, heroic stuff, and the audience watches and pretends they’re him. It’s thoroughly pleasant and in no way taxing.
Seriously, after the movie, my husband noted, “Rampage is not trying to be Three Billboards.”
And I was like, “Three Billboards? It’s not even trying to be Jurassic Park.” Honestly, it’s even in a different subgenre than that other action movie staring The Rock coming out later this year. (You know the one I mean? It looks like a mash-up of Die Hard and The Towering Inferno? It looks so good.)
No, Rampage is basically a children’s movie for adults. And there is nothing wrong with that. Its raison d’etre seems to be, “Remember that old game Rampage? Hey look! It’s The Rock!” And many a successful franchise has been built on less.
Not only did I like the movie, but it far surpassed my wildest expectations. That’s partially because the trailer was abysmal, partially because I’m usually bored by action movies, and partially because I found out I didn’t have a brain (or inner ear) tumor that morning, so I was just in a good mood.
Rampage may be silly, but it’s pretty entertaining, nonetheless. I genuinely enjoyed watching it from start to finish.
The Good:
Maybe the movie wouldn’t do so well on an IQ test, but it actually has a surprisingly high EQ. For some reason, the relationship between The Rock and the gorilla really works. I’ve got to hand it to him. Dwayne Johnson really sells it. He plays the whole thing completely straight, and his commitment pays off in a big way. I actually teared up at the beginning of the movie when I saw the bond of love and trust between Davis and George (because things were about to go south fast).
I should probably also give some credit to Jason Liles, the actor who plays George in motion capture. (It’s so weird they’re letting people who aren’t Andy Serkis do that now!) George and Davis truly seem connected, to the point that I realized my tender-hearted, nine-year-old daughter will definitely not be able to watch this movie without suffering a series of broken-hearted meltdowns.
The relationship between George and Davis is so good because it plays out like the fantasy of a young child. A “Daddy is big and strong and helps me calm down and makes me feel safe, but one day I will grow up so, so big and be the hero” kind of thing. Every young child fantasizes some variant of this at one point or another. The parent makes the child feel safe, and the child wants to grow up to be big and save the day (and the parent).
When I first noticed this lovely bit of subtext, the overall quality of the film rose in my estimation.
Also, the wolf reminds me of Rambo. Seriously, there’s an entire sequence of the movie that is like a remake of First Blood with a mutant wolf playing the Stallone part. That was unexpectedly awesome.
A lot of what I loved about this film was its zany moments coming out of left field. I particularly loved all the shocking deaths. If this were an R-rated movie, these might have been a tad too gruesome for my sensibilities, but they were all so bloodless and cartoony. They made me laugh every time. (Well, actually, I didn’t laugh. I just kept making this incredulous expression that made my husband nervous.) Maybe this would be a strike against the movie for most people, but I’m generally charmed by things that are shocking in the silliness of their absurdity (a vaguely Muppety kind of humor).
But what was really best about this movie was the lack of mind-numbing, overstimulating action scenes that always send me into a glassy-eyed, virtual coma. I expected brainless action. But no! Rampage actually features abundant character interaction and lots of dialogue, absolutely abysmal dialogue, I’ll grant you (like seriously, some scenes sound like they were written by a poorly programmed bot), but dialogue nonetheless. Better still, the action scenes we do get are so easy to watch and digest. I never got lost or zoned out once. And when the monsters were destroying Chicago, all the scenes were so grounded in specificity. It really did look like Chicago, not just some generic urban landscape.
Best Scene:
My favorite part of the whole movie is the little mini-remake of First Blood. At first I thought, “This is kind of like that fake Bourne movie. No…it’s more like First Blood. This actually really does remind me of First Blood.” And then it just kept reminding me more and more of First Blood, but the mutant wolf was standing in for Rambo. It was just awesome. That sequence also contains the moment that first drew a genuine smile (more like a smirk) and soundless chuckle from me. It’s my favorite death in the movie. I was thinking to myself, “Why are none of these men wearing any sort of protective head gear when they’re hunting a monster with so many guns? Surely there’s about to be a hail of bullets. Their skin will not protect them.” And then death came in such a random way. I loved it! Then another death that came a bit later (so early!) genuinely surprised me.
Best Action Sequence:
What’s best is that there are so few action sequences. From the preview, I was sure the movie was going to be one, long, mirthless action sequence, but Rampage surprised me.
As 2018 movies about big monsters smashing up cities go, I liked Rampage better than Pacific Rim: Uprising because I personally found it easier to follow the action.
But the big, action packed finale is best because it teaches a valuable lesson. Brute force and relentless assault are all well and good, but a carefully calculated, strategic attack usually works better. What Davis does is courageous. What George does is smart. (Seriously, it really is smart. If I were fighting an armored monster, George’s action would be my first choice if I could pull it off.) (And now I’m thinking of St. George and the Dragon.)
Best Scene Visually:
I love the deaths of two key villains. It’s hard to say which one I loved more, but one is definitely better visually.
In the car, my husband complained, “That wasn’t a great plan, though, because we’ve never seen X do Y before.”
I countered, “But we’ve also never seen X not do Y.” X has been going through some changes lately, you know. At this point in the story, X is a bit of a wild card, and I think the desperate gambit is as good a plan as any.
To be honest, as I watched this delicious moment, I somehow did not realize that this bold act was even part of a greater plan. (I don’t know how. I guess I was just reveling gleefully in the unexpected savagery of the moment. The movie goes out of its way to show you that this is the plan, which I realized retroactively a few beats later. I guess I just got caught up in the moment.)
I’m not usually a person who delights in violence, but I found every death in this movie a singular delight. In fact, in one very early scene (very early) (okay, the first scene), I got really upset when I momentarily fretted that a character might not die, after all. That just didn’t feel right. I think this movie primes the audience to feel satisfaction when characters die. That or I’ve just become a twisted sadist in my old age.
The Negatives:
Rampage gives us a pretty decent story and interesting, likable characters faced with suitably high stakes (both physically and emotionally).
But the dialogue is awful.
It’s like…I don’t want to exaggerate, so I’ll just say there’s never been worse dialogue written in human history. (I’m sure if the screenwriters happen across this review, they’ll dig up one of my novels and beg to differ.)
That conversation Davis and Kate have in the cornfield should be used as an example of what not to do in screenwriting class.
(I liked the look of the scene, oddly enough. All that corn made me think of Superman, and I decided, “The Rock really is the hero all Americans want to be right now. Davis is retired from special forces of some kind. He helps animals. The women come to him. He looks very manly surrounded by corn. What could be more American than that?”)
But the conversation in this scene could have been written by a kindergartner.
Poor Naomie Harris. She’s a good actress, and I liked her character entirely because of her performance. But I felt so sorry for her. It’s astonishing how good a performance she gives when she has worse than nothing to work with in terms of dialogue.
Her explanation for lying to Davis reminded me of excuses students used to give me for late work. “Sorry, I couldn’t take my quiz because my dog was having puppies.” (That’s a real one.) “So, anyways, my brother died…”
And I mean, we know she’s telling the truth because we’ve seen the photos in her apartment. But why do any of these self-focused explanations for her behavior convince Davis to trust her? He’s basically accusing her of self-serving lying, and her defense is, “No, listen! I lied to you to get something I want.” Why does what she says convince him to change his mind about her so quickly? There can be only one reason. As my Grandpa always used to say when my Grandma marveled about a character’s innexplicable actions, “It’s in the script, Alyse.”
I like Harris. She makes the most of the lines she’s given and should honestly get an Academy Award for making anything at all of lines like these.
And then there’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s whack ball character. It’s like somebody told him, “Imagine Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. Now play a caricature of that, but try to make it bad.” I kept waiting for him to pull off his mask and reveal he’s the new Colonel Sanders. He’s not quite as convincing in the role as Reba McEntire, but in the right outfit, I believe he could get the job done.
As I watched, I honestly couldn’t decide if his character was so crazy it worked, or if it was just so crazy. Now from a story standpoint, the character was definitely convenient. He did a lot of necessary things. Without him, the screenwriters would have had to think a whole lot harder about how certain events could happen. Morgan’s Russell is how Northerners think we say, “Deus ex machina,” down South. (That sentence sounded better with a “we,” but I’m from Texas and don’t actually consider myself a Southerner. I don’t consider this character a Southerner either.)
I will say that some scenes were only entertaining because Jeffrey Dean Morgan was hamming it up so much. His exchanges with Colonel Blake are all pretty dumb and would be about as much fun to watch as wallpaper drying if Morgan wasn’t delivering his lines like the kid trying to stand out in the school play. So I guess I applaud Morgan for doing what was needed to make the movie entertaining since this was definitely not a situation where (as actors in prestige pictures love to gush) “it was all on the page.”
Demetrius Grosse gives a good performance as Colonel Blake, but, again, his part is not great. Why do movies always portray people in charge of major military operations as so incapable of rational thought? If high ranking people in the armed forces were as foolhardy, bullheaded, and trigger happy as their counterparts in movies, then our military (which has some pretty good stuff in its arsenal) would have blown all of our own cities to smithereens by now, and I don’t recall that happening. It’s so easy to make the guy in charge of the troops look stubborn and dumb. It’s such a lazy choice.
Now in the case of Jake Lacy as Brett Wyden, the script is pretty bad, and the actor is apparently incapable of rising above it, so that’s unfortunate. As Brett’s scheming sister Claire, Malin Akerman does a bit better.
But despite everything I’ve said, I do love Jake Lacy and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s final scene together.
Also, while I wasn’t crazy about the early scene of Connor trying to impress the girl, I got far more interested when I discovered in the end credits that Connor was played by Jack Quaid, son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. That realization made me realize I am one old gorilla.
Overall:
I enjoyed Rampage from start to finish. I don’t mean that I found a way to enjoy it (which is very different and often what I have to do with movies like this that aren’t deemed strong enough for a summer release).
I expected Rampage to be bad. I had a strategy ready for engaging with it. If it was mind-numbingly unfun, I would watch to see how it stacked up against the new Tomb Raider (which I liked but many didn’t). But I never had to break out this little survival game. The movie was honestly enjoyable. It was like a kids’ movie for grown ups. (I would let my actual kids watch, too, but other parents might be uncomfortable with the cartoonish violence and general sense of peril.)
If you get to the theater and Avengers: Infinity War is sold out, see Rampage. Based on how late they all showed up, I’m guessing that’s what most of the people in the theater with us did. And it seemed to work out all right for them.