Rampage (2018)

He-man Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (Dwayne Jonson)—for some reason using the name Davis Okoye, but he’s just The Rock—pretends to be a special forces trained killing machine, who loves animals. He’s also a primatologist, which in this film does not require any scholarly training; it just means you hang out with apes and joke around, when not massacring bad dudes who messed with the animals. He’s buddy-buddy with George, the albino gorilla. Unfortunately George runs into a genetic re-writing mist that squirts out of a container that fell from a space station, turning George into a giant monster with anger issues. Far worse, similar mists also effected a wolf and an alligator, giving us a whole lot of monsters headed toward Chicago. Dr. Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris) shows up to exposition all over The Rock so that he knows about the evil corporation behind it all. The Rock and the Doc abandon all the characters that we were introduced to in the first act to go save George and Chicago, now working with their new friend, the secret agent cowboy (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). It looks like there’s going to be a lot of giant monster battles…but not for a very, very long time.

It isn’t a problem that Rampage is unrelentingly stupid. This is a film about a giant gorilla, an even bigger flying wolf, and a gigantic armored alligator, so being smart was never going to be a thing. But it does matter how it is stupid. Wolf with wings? That’s fine. Shooting The Rock right in the stomach so he dies, and then having him pop up five minutes later acting fine with the explanation that the bullet missed all the vital organs? That’s not fine. Also on the not fine list is that modern weaponry seems to have no effect on these beasties. Look, I can accept a giant Earth moth that responds to fairy songs and has attack pollen, so I’m not that picky. I don’t need smart; just don’t keep rubbing the stupid in my face.

But the stupid would be easier to take if the rest worked. If we got tossed into some good monster on monster action. But Ramage has a lot of time to waste and waste it it does. It spends more time with character beats than with mayhem, and all the character stuff (except between The Rock and George) is awful. We spend time with three characters around the primate center: a manager-type and two students. We get a reasonably good idea of what the manager is like, and we get to see the students’ single defining traits (he’s a coward, she’s got the hots for our star). And then… they’re gone. Did they get killed to provide motivation? Nope. They just stopped being in the picture. So, why did we spend time with them? Cut them, and that’s more time with a flying wolf eating people. Its far worse with The Rock and the Doc, as their “character development” isn’t just unnecessary, it’s painful: Brother with cancer; jail time; The Rock seeing how mean people are. Oh, the emotional depth… Yeah. When the point of your film is to have a giant ape punch a giant wolf, maybe you shouldn’t be going for serious emotions. That or write better dialog and have the actors at least try and express those emotions. And all that character stuff comes to nothing. Zero. There’s no payoff. The only thing needed is that The Rock and George like each other, and we even get too much of that. Everything else is waste of time. So much time.

What we have here is a bad script, with bad dialog and bad plot points, brought to life with bad acting, that fills in the time between monster fights. OK. That’s pretty standard in the Daikaiju film world and can be a good time, as long as there’s plenty of that sweet, sweet monster goodness. But there’s not “plenty.” There’s not enough. What little we get is fine, though nothing special. The CGI is pretty good. The fight sequences aren’t great and have too many long shots, but they’ll do. There just aren’t enough of them.

Rampage is forgettable and I suspect it will be forgotten.