Rampage

Growing up, we were a Sega house:  No NES or SNES to be found, but we had (and still have!) a Master System and a Genesis, followed by a Playstation, a PS2, an XBox, an XBox 360, a GameBoy, and a number of cheap garbage systems (if anyone remembers the R-Zone, I had the handheld version, ’cause I was a poor scrub).  With the Master System, my family gleaned hours upon hours of collective entertainment.  Switching off controllers with ended lives, we made it to Level 77 of Teddy Boy (I had to watch a YouTube video years later to see that the game looped around after Level 99); I fought to the final boss of Shinobi, but never beat the damn game; and my brother and I made it to the final labyrinth of Golden Axe Warrior (an unabashed Zelda clone, though done at a higher level of quality than Hydlide), but neither of us have been able to surmount the damn thing.  One of our favorite games to play together, aside from Great Golf, was Rampage.  Who wouldn’t love to saunter about various cities as giant creatures, wrecking shit, eating people, getting electrocuted by neon signs, spitting out bathtubs, smacking each other around (resulting in a facial expression of “Ow, my eye! That hurt, you jerk!”), and being attacked by the minuscule military forces?  It was a blast.

My (non-NBA) jam!

When I first heard that the game was being adapted to the screen, I was working at a local movie theatre and scrolling through the upcoming projects listed on IMDb.  When I made it to Rampage, I initially thought that they were remaking the Uwe Boll flick, but then I saw that Dwayne Johnson was involved.  And I saw references to monsters wrecking cities.  “Oh, my God,” said I aloud, lifting my hand incredulously to my mouth, “they’re making a movie out of Rampage.  Hell yes!  I can’t wait for this thing to come out!”  I was honestly excited, ’cause Rampage was a game begging to be made into a cheesy kaiju-style movie.  Sure, I had to wait a little over a year, but I was eventually proven right.

Much like the game, the film revolves around the military taking on a trio of giant creatures – George the gorilla, Ralph the wolf, and Lizzie the, well, lizard – as they wreak havoc on a major city.  But while the game portrayed the creatures as mutated humans, the film pivots to make them mutated animals with increased aggression and traits from other animals (for example, as we saw in the trailers, Ralph’s got some flying squirrel or what-have-you in him, allowing him to glide about).  The military effort is joined by the primatologist formerly taking care of George (and, of course, he’s ex-special forces), one of the genetic engineers responsible for the animals’ mutations, and an agent of some shady governmental organization.  Meanwhile, the creatures are being manipulated by a greedy pair of sibling industrialists.  Insert destruction and mayhem on the streets of Chicago.

Lemme get this out of the way as soon as possible:  This movie is dumb as all hell.  Yeah, there’s no getting around it, it’s one of the biggest, dumbest things put out since Jurassic World or even Independence Day: Resurgence.  More than that, it’s got issues galore.  The plot is overly convoluted, the thread involving the siblings is almost entirely unnecessary (aside from setting things up, anyway), some of the acting is as broad as audiences could possibly allow outside of a ’40s-era screwball comedy, the script is kinda hacky and cheesy, and the CGI is overblown and occasionally a bit shoddy.  And none of this matters.

Why?  ‘Cause this movie succeeds where others, like the aforementioned pair, abjectly failed, namely by being fun.  Throughout, regardless of what’s happening in the story, the tone is kept consistently relatively light, and the actors – especially Johnson and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (AKA the man with the voice I really want) – are mostly so charismatic that they could probably get away with just about anything.  As much as I’ve grown to loathe the Sharknado series, at least it knows what it is and embraces its stupidity and absurdity, allowing audiences to have fun alongside the filmmakers, something plenty of others, the Jurassic World people especially (not to mention the makers of most of the straight-to-video horror sequels I’ve seen over the past few years), have yet to grasp.  As dumb and bloated as the plot can be, there’s enough charm, fun, and giant-animal chaos to get you to overlook the flaws.

Johnson absolutely owns the role, his physical presence seemingly being a manifestation of his body’s attempts to contain his massive amounts of inherent charisma, and there’s plenty of support to go around, from Morgan’s cowboy-like g-man to the bevvy of smaller roles and glorified cameos from Joe Manganiello, Will Yun Lee, Marley Shelton, Matt Gerald (Melvin from Netflix’s Daredevil), and Jake Lacy (I struggled to place his face, though a quick look-up told me I’ve seen him all over the place, but it was Love the Coopers that I couldn’t remember).  Admittedly, I felt Malin Akerman’s conniving businesswoman and Naomie Harris’s geneticist were kinda flat and/or overbaked (depending on the scene), but they didn’t hinder the fun too much.  Director Brad Peyton is no stranger to big, effects-heavy feats (like San Andreas and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) or cheese-fests (like Cats & Dogs 2 and Incarnate), and he takes a breezy approach to this film, keeping things light and fast and fun.

Basically, this is nearly the second coming of Independence Day: it’s big, it’s loaded with special effects, the story doesn’t fully work, but you almost have no choice but to enjoy it.  For me, it joins the ranks of ID4, Judge Dredd, and Armageddon as big, dumb movies I can’t but sit back and enjoy, regardless of their respective litanies of flaws.  Give it a go, especially if you find similar films similarly entertaining or if you just can’t get enough of giant monsters wrecking cities.