Rampage

• Title: Rampage
• IMDb: link

Rampage is big dumb fun, but it’s a little light on the fun. Based on a simplistic 32 year-old arcade game and its various sequels concerning giant monsters toppling buildings, the film centers on Dwayne “It’s Okay to Call Me The Rock Again” Johnson and his ape friend George who is one of a small group of creatures enlarged and driven violent by gas from a secret orbital laboratory run by a pair of douchey CEOs (Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy, neither of whom appear competent enough to run a taco stand let alone a multi-billion dollar company). There’s also a scientist (Naomie Harris) and a government agent (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who figure into the long and drawn-out set-up before the film finally offers us monsters destroying a city.

Director Brad Peyton‘s largest asset is The Rock who makes the film watchable, if not always enjoyable. The best scenes are between The Rock and his ape pal George (even if the humor is pretty lowbrow). As for the rest of the film, it’s comparable enough to any throwaway monster flick from the 1950s with plenty of plotholes and monsters that are somewhat interesting but aren’t necessarily all that scary.

Rampage is exactly what I expected from a feature adaptation of arcade game more than three decades old. There was little to the game other than the fun of digital carnage and the movie condenses this into about 20 minutes of solid action inflating the rest of the extended story with poorly-cast villains, a convoluted plot to create our super-sized creatures, and tie-ins for characters seemingly only in the movie to help boost its star power and flesh out character interactions not necessary to the primary plot. Still, the movie has The Rock and some big dumb monsters that trash a city. If keep your expectations in check, you may find it mildly diverting for an hour and a half or so.