Rampage (2018)

I have recollections of the Rampage arcade game. I don't think I ever played it, but at the time it was an interesting enough concept to draw my attention.

Of course video games have come a long way since then, and what might have been vaguely interesting to a 15-year old is not quite as much a draw to someone in his late forties.

So Rampage would have been a miss for me. Only it starred Dwayne Johnson, whom you could place in one of those Yule log fire videos and it would be a billion times more watchable. And it was directed by Brad Peyton who made San Andreas (also starring Johnson), which was big, dumb and incredibly fun.

Placing Johnson in the movie definitely makes it much more watchable. And Brad Peyton manages to produce a few decent set pieces. But the movie really failed to work for me in a couple of key areas.

The first might be a result of disaster fatigue. Every big budget movie these days seems to destroy at least one American city. Those that best succeed for me are the ones that bring in the destruction at a ground level - Cloverfield, Godzilla, even Peyton's San Andreas all remember the human element. With Rampage I never felt the sense of real world consequences to the carnage. The hyper-kinetic editing didn't help in that regard either, with some scenes being lit too poorly for such quick cuts, so it was difficult enough to follow what was occurring to feel any genuine sense of peril.

The second was the escalation. The film starts relatively small - a bust up in the zoo, a hunt for an over-sized wolf in a forest, but then when it gets to the city the carnage ramps up to 11 and really has nowhere to go from there. I was sitting in the cinema, wishing for some sense of climax to the film, but it was probably less satisfying than watching someone playing the old arcade game.

For the most part I didn't actively dislike the movie, but after walking away from it, I was left with a rapidly increasing sense of dissatisfaction.