MOVIE REVIEW: RAMPAGE

 

 

As a teenager in the eighties, I spent countless hours feeding quarters into video game machines at the local arcades. I remember losing fortunes in games such as FIREFOX, DISCS OF TRON, STAR WARS and of course RAMPAGE.

The idea of playing a giant monster destroying a city and gobbling up people after grabbing them out of their humble abode both fitted perfectly my love of monster movies like KING KONG and GODZILLA, and my obvious antisocial tendencies.

So it's no surprise I ran to Brad Peyton's new adaptation of the classic Bally-Midway's video game. It may seem odd to see a 30 year old franchise been adapted as a  $120 million blockbuster, but then again, for decades, long vanished properties have been brought back to life by producers who grew up on them, whether they are old TV shows, long cancelled cartoons, or, as it is the case here, a forgotten arcade game. However, recently renewed interest in giant monsters (thanks to Peter Jackson's uneven reboot of KING KONG (2005), Jordan Vogt-Roberts' surprisingly fun KONG SKULL ISLAND (2017), Gareth Edward's GODZILLA (2015), Guillermo Del Toro's somewhat disappointing PACIFIC RIM (2013) and its entertaining yet forgettable sequel PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING (Steven S. DeKnight, 2017)) most likely inspired RAMPAGE's army of producers to bring George, Ralph and Lizzie to the big screen.

Adapting classic video-games to the big screen can be difficult. Just ask Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel who nearly killed their careers with 1993's mind-numbing train wreck SUPER MARIO BROS. Dwayne Johnson himself was trapped in the dreadful movie version of DOOM (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2005), and most assuredly hopes this one will help bury this sordid experience deeper in the oubliettes of disposable cinema. As a rule, films based on an arcade game will most often be empty vessels devoid of any valid character development and mainly finding its entertainment value in mindless action. Going through a list of films based on such games, I can only find one that worked in some ways, and even then, it is a hell of a stretch to consider 1995's MORTAL KOMBAT (Paul W. S. Anderson) as a decently good film.

However, a lot of films before the creation of arcade games followed a narrative structure that lent itself particularly well to game play. The best example probably being Bruce Lee's GAME OF DEATH (1978), all the way to different stages with a different ''boss''. So one would think that there could be ways to translate a game to a solid narrative more efficiently. Although, to be frank, no one goes to see a film based on a video game expecting it to be a transcendent, life-affirming experience.

And pretty much the same can be expected from RAMPAGE. The name itself is more a promise of wanton mindless carnage than a deep exploration into the depth of human psyche. And Brad Peyton delivers once more, after 2015's wildly entertaining, over the top disaster movie SAN ANDREAS, another vehicle for his muscle bound muse Dwayne Johnson.

After a dangerous pathogen infects a trio of animals; an albino gorilla named George, a wolf nicknamed Ralph, and an alligator that we have to assume is known under the moniker Lizzie, primatologist Davis Okoye (Johnson) teams up with a defrocked geneticist (Naomie Harris) and FBI spook Harvey Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to find a way to reconnect with his simian friend George, and defeat the other gigantic creatures.

Dwayne Johnson continues to radiate his extraordinary charisma, that recently contributed to save the JUMANJI remake from the original film's tepid fate. His relationship with George is pretty much the core of the film, and save from a couple of groan worthy visual gags, is the emotional anchor of the story. It can be argued that George, performed beautifully by motion capture actor Jason Liles, is the best actor of the film, aided by the superb special effects. His character more or less combines the gentleness of MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949, Ernest B. Schoedsack) and SON OF KONG (1933, Ernest B. Schoedsack), with the more tragic growth spurt that had previously affected KONGA in1961 (John Lemont).

Dwayne Johnson with Motion Capture performer Jason Liles, who studied gorillas for months to perfect his dead-on performance.

The other standout is the scenery chewing Jeffrey Dean Morgan who channels his THE WALKING DEAD's Negan personae as the rascally FBI agent who will become Johnson's ally in his fight against monsters.

 The screenplay doesn't even attempt in humanizing the villains of the piece, a brother and sister team of greedy industrialists, played by Jake Lacey and Malin Akerman with moustache twirling abandon, nor does it explain why the more sympathetic giant creature, George, doesn't go through the same kind of mutating disfigurement the other giant creatures are going through. But somehow, it didn't really bother me as I walked in the theatre to eat popcorn and see giant monsters beat the crap out of each other, and I got my wish, in a rousing carnage through Chicago in the last half hour of the film that evoked perfectly the 1986 games that gobbled up so much of my allowance.

In the end, RAMPAGE succeeds better at offering giant creature thrills than the recent PACIFIC RIM sequel and is in a silly way more satisfying than the more ambitious and high-brow GODZILLA remake by Gareth Edwards. Don't misunderstand me; it is by no means a better film, but it is sure as heck more fun!

Dwayne Johnson pretty much sums up his feelings about the kind of pop corn flicks he wants to make in a recent ROLLING STONE interview:

“Life brings that shit — I don’t want it in my movies,” he continued. “When the credits roll, I want to feel great.”

I'd be curious to see a more meaningful Dwayne Johnson movie sometimes in the future, but in the meantime, RAMPAGE pretty much lives up to that statement.