Rampage is stupid, but it’s a good kind of stupid. I vaguely remember playing the arcade game as a kid (and played the updated version at Dave & Buster’s about a month ago) and was curious about how a movie would work since the game has little plot. In the game, you select one of three huge monsters: a gorilla (that’s totally not King Kong), a lizard (that’s totally not Godzilla) or a wolf (that’s, um, a wolf) and you try to tear down buildings while the military tries to shoot you down. Fun game, but not a lot to work with for a film. I was concerned that they would try to do too much with the concept, but I’m happy to report that that isn’t the case. This movie has about as little plot as possible and the story is basically an excuse to get the monsters ripping shit up. And I mean that as a compliment.
Three cannisters containing DNA-altering ooze are ejected from a crashing space station and land on earth, each conveniently landing near one of the animals from the game (though the lizard is a crocodile in this, which I guess is close enough). The humorously evil company behind all of this activates a signal in Chicago that summons the three monsters, causing them to converge on the city for a….wait for it…..rampage. The majority of the plot focuses on the gorilla and his scientist pal played by The Rock (I work with a lot of scientists and they all look like him, so that’s solid casting), turning the gorilla into something of the good guy of the three beasts. The wolf and the crocodile are just assholes, really.
This movie is dumb, but it knows that it’s dumb and that’s why it works. All of the characters are just caricatures to move along the action as necessary. The two villains, a brother and sister that run the company responsible for the monsters, are over-the-top assholes. They should be sitting in huge armchairs and petting cats while Inspector Gadget tries to stop them. The Rock is just The Rock. The man has no range and basically always plays the same character over and over again, but he’s smart enough to pick roles that allow this schtick to work. He’s kinda like a modern-day Schwarzenegger, who absolutely would have played this role if the movie was made in the 80s. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is also in this as a government agent and he’s interesting, I’ll give him that. He seems to be playing a cowboy that’s thinking that maybe he does like men but isn’t sure yet. It’s as if he thought “fuck it, this movie is stupid, I’ll just make this weirder than it needs to be.” It sounds like I’m ripping on the performances but I’m actually not. They lack any kind of substance, but that’s appropriate in a movie based on an arcade game that didn’t even have any human characters.
The real attraction here, though, is seeing the monsters tear the shit out of buildings. The movie does a surprisingly good job once the monsters reach Chicago and the resulting scenes are a great representation of the arcade game brought to life. I love giant monster movies and this shows legitimate love for the genre without dragging things down with excessive plot and uninteresting characters (unlike, for example, the Godzilla movie from a few years ago). It really is fun. Dumb, immature fun.
As for the negatives, there is a bit too much of The Rock. His performance is fine (since he’s playing his one character again) and some of the scenes with him and the gorilla are legitimately funny, but I wish his character had been kept more on the sideline during the major action scenes in the last act. I wanted more of the monsters fighting each other without this guy getting in the way. Also, and this is really just a nitpick, but I don’t understand why they make the crocodile so much larger and more powerful than the other two. It isn’t a big deal, but they are all supposed to be basically equal and the fights could have been better if that was the case here.
I would recommend seeing this in a theater, especially since the scope of the action scenes really benefit from a large screen (I saw it in IMAX). Don’t expect a masterpiece, but it’s a fun way to spend a couple hours if you don’t want to fight the crowds to see Avengers just yet.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampage_(2018_film)#/media/File:Rampage_teaser_film_poster.jpg
