Rampage (2018) - Review

The never-ending attempt at adapting video games to the big screen continues, this time with an arcade classic. Could the star power of The Rock and the popularity of modern Kaiju monsters break through the glass ceiling and present a GOOD video game movie??? Nope.

In Rampage, Dwayne Johnson stars as Davis, a primate expert who is close friends with an albino silverback gorilla named George. When George is exposed to a chemical, his cells rapidly evolve as a result of genetic editing. Soon, Davis and George are caught up in a battle for their lives when the government, shady corporation Energyne, and 2 other animals are all fighting for control of these creatures.

Sadly, Rampage lacks too much in both story depth and strong performances for me to classify it as a "good" video game movie. In fact, the dialogue is at times so poor, I contemplated walking out of the theater. But I did not. I stuck through for you, the reader, to bring to you this honest review.

There are some parts where this movie is incredibly watchable. Dwayne Johnson is undeniably this generation's great movie star, and his charisma really shines here. When Johnson is interacting with George and the other animals, the film is entertaining, with a few gags having me laughing out loud. Sadly, when Johnson is opposite a live, human actor, the film is so bogged down in hammy dialogue and mounds of exposition that Rampage slows down to a snail's pace.

The action scenes are pretty banal, with nothing memorable featured. In recent years, we have seen a number of CGI monsters battling it out (Pacific Rim and Pacific Rim: Uprising, Godzilla, and Kong: Skull Island), so seeing a computerized gorilla battling a computerized wolf is not special whatsoever. In fact, this film suffers from something that is commonplace in giant monster movies: the monsters take a back seat to boring and underdeveloped human characters. I would love to see one of these films do away with the trope of needing a human vehicle to guide the story, and instead give us feature length battles. Why not upset the genre's status quo?

Rampage does dive into some deeper themes, particularly the notion of what happens when humans inject science into nature. Sadly, director Brad Peyton and writers Ryan Engle, Carlton Cuse, Ryan J. Condal, and Adam Szytykiel portray this so shallowly, that it is more of a buried 10-feet below message than it is a thematic plot thread. A film like Jurassic Park is simultaneously more thought provoking and more entertaining than Rampage, covering the exact same theme.

Rampage is not a meaningful film. It is a popcorn flick. If you like watching big monsters battle it out, or if you are a Dwayne Johnson fan, you might get *some* enjoyment out of this, but unless you are a Rocky die hard, I would SKIP IT.