Rampage review: Dwayne Johnson's latest boisterous film is your new Friday night date
Dir: Brad Peyton; Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman, Jake Lacy. 12A cert, 107 min
A mere fortnight after Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle left British cinemas, here comes Dwayne Johnson again with a similarly hushed and introspective tale about the love between a man and his giant albino gorilla. Rampage is based on a cult video game from the Eighties in which three enormous beasts lay waste to a pixellated cityscape, but it has clearly been devised as a bespoke Johnson project, playing to the former wrestler’s obvious action-star strengths while shearing off anything that might slow down the ride.
And it is exactly how these big, thick destruction films should be done: the script is boisterously funny, the action sequences have real flair and sweep, and the central human-primate friendship is even quite moving at points. You might be wondering how it could be possible for anyone to convincingly express tenderness on screen towards an outsized, rippling beast with a gimlet glare and arms that could rip the turret off a Panzer tank, but somehow the gorilla manages it.
His name is George – Furious, rather than Curious, for the most part – though when the film begins, he is happily ensconced in a wildlife sanctuary in San Diego, joshing via sign language with his best bud Davis Okoye (Johnson), the primatologist who saved him as an infant from Rwandan poachers. But trouble drops by in the form of a canister of experimental nerve agent called CRISPR, which falls into his enclosure from an exploding space station, and sends George’s growth rate and temper into overdrive.
The same accident plays out twice more elsewhere in America, on the plains of Wyoming and in the Florida Everglades: anyone who has played the game or seen the trailer will already know the results, but the film has so much fun unveiling them it would be a pity to give them away in print. Soon enough, there are three berserk monsters converging on downtown Chicago, and only one man with the zoological nous and muscle mass to stop them.
In a very real sense this is all there is to Brad Peyton’s film, which keeps playing its two winning cards over and over again, and is smart enough to realise they are more than enough. The first is the giant animal carnage itself, which crackles with fun ideas and flourishes throughout. The second is the comic chemistry of a superbly picked cast who bring everyone in on the joke. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a smirking, drawling hoot as a special agent drafted in by the government to clean up the mess. “When science s___s the bed, I’m the guy they call to change the sheets,” is how the character pitches it, a sentence Morgan delivers with the sparkle of a man who can recognise a dumb one-liner for the ages.
The science itself is the domain of Naomie Harris’s hard-pressed geneticist Dr Kate Caldwell, who explains George’s predicament to Davis by quickly scrolling through the nerve agent’s Wikipedia page on her phone – Rampage’s lack of patience for disaster-movie niceties is one of its most winning traits – before quickly supplanting his three zany colleagues (fun act-one turns from PJ Byrne, Jack Quaid and Breanne Hill) as the film’s sidekick-in-chief.
As the brains behind CRISPR, Dr Caldwell is also being framed for the disaster, although the real villains are Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy’s Claire and Brett Wyden, two big-business dynasty siblings whose similarity to a certain Ivanka and Donald Jr is, you have to assume, entirely deliberate, at least on the part of the costume department. If Rampage's giant monsters stand for anything – and giant monsters usually do, even in films as silly as this one – it is the destructive self-interest of the monstrously rich, and there is an unexpectedly topical plot thread here about billionaire grifters in gilded office blocks getting their FBI-mandated just desserts. But any resemblance to America’s current political plight, intentional or otherwise, is far slighter than the obvious debt the computer-generated carnage owes to the September 11th attacks, which are repeatedly and graphically evoked in the Chicago-set finale, with its crumbling towers and ash-clouds that swell and billow down city blocks.
Some might call that a cheap tactic, and they might well be right. Yet exorcising national fears in the cinema with the help of a supersized ape is nothing new: just ask King Kong from the racist Thirties, a savage brought to America in shackles who breaks loose, threatens delicate white women, and creates inner-city havoc. And who knows? In the best part of a century, or perhaps even sooner, Rampage might look like the defining social document of our moment. But in the meantime, at least, it’s your Friday night uproariously filled.
