Review: RAMPAGE

RAMPAGE 
(ACTION/SCI-FI) 
★★
Directed by Brad Peyton
Screenplay by Ryan Engle and Carlton Cuse & Ryan J. Condal and Adam Sztykiel
Story by Ryan Engle
Based on Rampage by Midway Games
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Malin Akerman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jake Lacy, Joe Manganiello, Marley Shelton, P.J. Byrne, Demetrius Grosse, Jack Quaid, Breanne Hill, Matt Gerald, Will Yun Lee, Urijah Faber
Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence, action and destruction, brief language, and crude gestures.
107 minutes
Verdict: While delivering on the promise of bombastic brain-dead monster action, RAMPAGE is more dumb than fun.

I'm not a video game kind of person, but RAMPAGE is one of the rare video game-based movies that I can actually compare to the game, because I remember playing it on Nintendo 64 at a friend's house one day when I was 8 or 9 years old.  Basically, it was a very old-fashioned seeming game, even at the time, originally from 1986, where you played as either a giant gorilla ripoff of King Kong, a giant lizard ripoff of Godzilla, or as some random giant wolf-man, and then you try to smash buildings or other monsters or something.  For some reason, it stuck in my mind.

Frankly, the new movie directed by Brad Peyton, and somehow written by four different people, doesn't actually add much more to the story.  The monsters in the game were transformed people, according to Wikipedia, which they aren't in this, but other than that, for better or worse, it's still basically excuse to let a giant gorilla, a giant crocodile and a giant wolf wreak havoc and eat people.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, for whom this kind of movie is now standard, is the human, non-CGI star as Davis Okoye, a primatologist with a vaguely defined background as a mercenary/special ops/poacher-killer, who works as at a wild animal park in California and is friends with a rare albino silverback gorilla named "George."  When a space station hosting illegal genetic experiments breaks apart in orbit above Earth, capsules containing experimental gas break through the atmosphere and crash down across North America, one of  them landing in George's enclosure, and it quickly mutates him to grow at a rapid rate and become unnaturally aggressive.  Elsewhere in the States, a capsule mutates a wolf into a gigantic, flying monster and another turns an American crocodile into a warped leviathan.  Meanwhile, the unscrupulous corporation behind the experiments, personified by the evil Claire Wyden (Malin Akerman) and her dumb brother Brett (Jake Lacy), is working to cover up the evidence and turn on a radar to draw the monsters to their headquarters in the city to create chaos.
Okoye is mostly interested in helping his "friend," George, so he enlists the help of Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris), a discredited genetic engineer who had been involved with the corporation's work, and gets help whenever convenient from a government agent who seems to be everywhere, all the time, Harvey Russell, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who you could say is the only member of the cast who knows what kind of movie he's in, but he's still playing it awfully high.

Fortunately, it doesn't take long at all to get into the monster mayhem, but every time the movie takes a moment to get back to human characters and make its half-assed, weirdly broad attempts to give them any sort of background, it's hopelessly dull.  Johnson is on cruise control, giving ham-handed lines to a CGI gorilla, and the villainous siblings played by Akerman and Lacy are a less fun carbon copy of the villains from SUPERMAN III.  Morgan's drawl-heavy performance is intermittently amusing, but his character makes no sense, popping up whenever it's convenient to the plot.
Really, the whole point of the movie is the monsters, and the movie doesn't withhold.  Plenty of people are devoured gruesomely, pushing boundaries with gore in the PG-13 rating to a surprising degree, especially for a movie this cartoony, and frankly, regardless of content, feels like a kids movie much of the time.  Personally, I'm not a huge fan of people being eaten onscreen; it's a fine line between fun and sickening, but weirdly enough, the messier deaths where people get torn up don't bother me as much as people being swallowed, e.g. Katie McGrath's prolonged demise in JURASSIC WORLD.  The deaths in RAMPAGE are mostly messy, so that's fine by me.  It's a little nasty, but it's alright.  The whole thing feels really slight, however, because there's so little story, and the encounters with the monsters during the first half of the movie just feel like previews whetting the appetite for the main showcase in the third act climax.

Even in the seemingly simple objective of dumb fun, RAMPAGE still isn't the "good video game" adaptation that continues to elude Hollywood, although it seems to have a better idea of how to get there than a lot of other that have tried.  It aims for the appeal of the Transformers series with epic fights that cause absurd destruction, and JURASSIC WORLD, with brainless bloody mayhem, and the Fast & Furious series with a weirdly earnest theme about friendship.  Unfortunately, it's just more dumb than it is fun.

                                                                                                                                                          Images via Warner Brothers