Vaguely foreign terrorists straight out of Air Force One are smart enough to plan an elaborate heist but can’t land a single bullet on our barn-door sized hero. The entire movie is teeming with ’90s action movie archetypes. We didn’t question the feats of strength performed by Schwarzenegger and Stallone in the ’80s and ’90s, so why wouldn’t we suspend our disbelief when Johnson holds a bridge together with his bare hands in 2018? Logic is for losers. See also: San Andreas, in which all 26 square feet of Dwayne Johnson was squeezed into a tiny rescue helicopter. We’ve all seen the shot of Johnson running and jumping into the flaming building, and no one seems to have any problem with the fact that The Rock has the size and approximate speed of a milk float. He’s essentially a risk assessment nerd - a clipboard-carrying killjoy - but because The Rock is a gigantic action behemoth, Will Sawyer will snap approximately 38 terrorist spines on his risk assessing adventures. The Rock plays Will Sawyer, the most electrifying man in skyscraper security analysis. He’s been on a one-man crusade ever since to keep the old-school action era alive, and if that means making Die Hard knock-offs and disaster flicks and obscure videogame movies, then so be it. Johnson, however, wasn’t having any of that. It felt like a symbolic transition at the time, but Arnie knew the plates were shifting: mainstream audiences would soon only tolerate the golden age of action heroes in Expendables movies and ironic cameos. Think back to Welcome to the Jungle (aka The Rundown), when Arnold Schwarzenegger literally handed Johnson the action hero baton. A man who makes action moves at least two decades out of style and still makes money like it’s going out of fashion. He is a walking, talking, weight-lifting, tequila-slamming anomaly. At least, it would be were it not for Dwayne Johnson, the man known affectionately as ‘The Rock’ due to him being roughly the same size as Alcatraz Island. Put simply, the age of the oiled-up, muscle-bound, Portaloo-sized action hero is over. Hell, even Benedict Cumberbatch is an action hero. Action movies have had to mature since the millennium: screen heroes have got smarter, faster, less muscly and more socially conscious. Skyscraper is a glorious throwback to better days the era of action movies where heroes shot first, quipped second and cared very little for collateral damage or carbon footprint. Right? The one with the big building! And the terrorists! You know: Skyscraper! ROCK HARD Just another ordinary commute to the office for Dwayne Johnson If it wasn’t for the impressive CGI and the appearance of Johnson - the very model of modern masculinity - you’d swear blind that Skyscraper was a movie that you’d seen before in the 1990s, maybe one you’d half-watched while drunk at 12.30am, possibly starring Christopher Lambert or Christian Slater. We’ll never know who came up with such an original idea, but it might as well have been the creators of new Dwayne Johnson movie Skyscraper, an old school disaster movie with its head in the clouds and a high concept that’s 3500ft above sea level. The old anecdote goes that Die Hard screenwriter Steven De Souza once had someone pitch a movie to him as “ Die Hard… in a building”.
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