Film Review: Rampage
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I swear about 80% of The Rock’s lines in this film are just the word ‘George’.
Rampage is the second movie to technically be based on a video-game released this year and also the second giant-monster smashing movie in the past month. It stars Dwayne ‘The John’ Rockson as primatologist Dwayne Johnson. Johnson’s apparent best friend, George the albino gorilla, consumes a mutagen and goes on a rampage. Consequently, we have the movie Rampage.
Look, I’m not going to stand here and tell you this film is high art. I’m not even going to tell you it’s a good movie. I am going to tell you that it’s completely, almost confrontingly fine. It’s one of the stupidest films I’ve seen this year. And I’ve seen The Cloverfield Paradox. But if you’re honestly upset that the movie Rampage, in which a giant gorilla goes on a rampage, is stupid… I’m not sure I can help you.
This film lives or dies on the charisma of its cast. As always, I found the Rock an engaging presence and Naomie Harris is perfectly serviceable. It’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan who stole the movie for me, though. He’s just doing Negan from The Walking Dead as a good guy and while I can see how that would annoy people, I didn’t mind it. That’s the only character I like from a show I hate and to see him in a less awful context was cathartic.
That being said, everyone in this movie plays an almost incomprehensibly stupid approximation of a human being. The plot is nonsensical mainly because of glaringly illogical decisions every single character consistently makes. Everyone, from the disposable sidekicks who are in the film’s opening for five minutes to the cliched corporate villains, are often infuriatingly ignorant.
Aside from that, there’s not much to say. The battles are fine, I suppose. The rules for animal mutation are confusing (why is the gorilla just a bigger version of himself but the wolf gets wings and spikes?). Also, as someone who’s been playing a lot of Shadow of the Colossus, I spent a lot of time thinking how easy the giant alligator would be to kill if only I had my sword.
If you’ve got 100 minutes to kill, you could certainly do worse and you could definitely do better.
Oh and as for the video-game movie curse thing, I barely even regard this as qualifying. It’s got nothing to do with it.