![]() ![]() ![]() Maybe they were all studio plants, but the audience at a Los Angeles press screening erupted into applause after that scene, and at least two other equally outrageous set-pieces, which just goes to show that suspension of disbelief doesn’t stand in the way of appreciating stunts previously confined to mind-benders like “The Matrix.” This is the kind of movie where, to break back into the burning building, Sawyer pulls himself up 100 or so stories on a construction crane and leaps across a 40-foot chasm to an open window, somehow finding the upper-body strength to pull himself through the crumbling ledge (all of this takes less time than it did for the monsters in “Rampage” to scale far shorter structures). Ridiculous is the name of the game in “Skyscraper,” an eye-rolling action movie delivered with a straight face by “Dodgeball: An Underdog Story” director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who recognizes that no one wants to watch a realistic rescue story (“Cat Saved From Tree,” say, or “Backdraft”) when they can have “The Rock’s Wife and Kids Nearly Burned to a Crisp in Blazing Building.” On the scale that ranges from implausibly entertaining to entertainingly implausible, “Skyscraper” comfortably falls toward the compulsively over-the-top end, generating thrills by straining credibility at every turn, relying on Johnson’s invaluable ability to engage the audience while defying physics, common sense, and the sheer limits of human stamina. That seems like an awful lot of trouble for a heist, and yet, it’s nothing compared with the extravagant lengths Dwayne Johnson’s character, Will Sawyer - a security consultant with a prosthetic leg and the world’s strongest finger muscles - will go to, to save his family, who are trapped inside. In “ Skyscraper,” terrorists purposefully set a 240-story building on fire in order to get at a flash drive locked away in the billionaire’s penthouse on top. People do ridiculous things in movies all the time. ![]()
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