Rampage - 2018, d. Brad Peyton - crave
I have little connection to the original Jumanji. I was almost 20 when it came out, and it seemed, quite clearly, a kids movie, plus Robin Williams was always more miss than hit with me . It was with my daughter that I finally watched it around the time the marketing engine for this sequel/reboot came out, and it was fine. It hasn't really stayed with me at all and Welcome to the Jungle hits home why: there's no real mythology to Jumanji. The whole thing is people get sucked into the game, and they have to win it to get out. Were this a horror movie, there would be a series of well established rules by which the participants have to play, firm canon or lore that should carry and build from one film to the next. ...Jungle pays a brief nod to Williams' character from the first, but that's about its only connection.
The loose connection aside, ...Jungle is a fun watch, if slightly overlong. The main cast, Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillen and Jack Black commit well to portraying teenagers with their dueling insecurities and self-absorption. Johnson playing scared or emotionally vulnerable is a side we don't see from him very often, and it's put to both comedic and dramatic effect, pulled off well in both cases. Black does a lot of the comedic heavy lifting, playing a pretty, popular girl stuck in Jack Black's body, but with an earnest effort at depth, not just a shallow caricature. Gillen is the awkward outcast thrust into an ass-kicking video game female form, complete with short shorts and a crop top. Gillen nails the insecure mannerisms, folding her arms most of the time to hide her midriff, the film commenting on how absurdly underdressed she is for the environment, but it should go further. Hart is the most like a Kevin Hart persona, and his character's journey seems the slightest (never truly addressing the meaning behind the fractured friendship that is brought up).
The execution of Jumanji-as-a-video-game is decent but minimal, as if the screenwriters only applied the basest of cliches and weren't experienced gamers themselves. There's so much room for commentary on video game culture and how youth culture interacts with it, but it's largely sidestepped for some decently entertaining action set pieces. Truly this is a kids action-adventure film (with a few dick jokes thrown in for the older kids) that is all-ages palatable. If the action falls flat its because the villain of the piece, played by Bobby Cannivale, is just a menacing void with no real personality or motivation. There's a sharper, smarter movie to be made here, hopefully with the next one.
While Jumanji 2 is about putting an action movie story into a video game structure, Rampage is actually taking a video game and making it into an action movie. Rampage has lived a few different lives since its mid-1980's origin, but it's almost uniformly been the same game. You play one of three monsters (Ralph is a giant wolf thing, Lizzie is a giant lizard thing, and George is a giant ape), you wreck buildings, eat people, smush tanks and bash helicopters to gain points (and you can also beat up the other monster). It's quite simple, frankly, and was mind-numbing fun for bored youth.
Turning that rather unassuming premise into a big action movie may seem like a bit of a chore but really it's a blank slate. There's no real mythology or lore to capture from Rampage the video game, so the writer, director, producers could basically take the property and do with it as they will, as long as it winds up at some point with the monsters wrecking buildings, eating people, smushing tanks, bashing helicopters and beating on each other.
Now I know I literally *just* said there was no real lore or mythology to the Rampage games, but the one main detail the game has that the movie ignores is that George, Lizzie and Ralph are people who mutate into these giant creatures. The film basically mutates an albino gorilla, a wolf, and an alligator into these giant creatures. So, you know, adaptation fail right there. When the source has so little to work with, how do you ignore one of its main components?
If, like most people, you have no connection to the video game, the story is fine. It's not ingenious but they have fun with it. A nefarious corporation run by siblings - one an evil genius, the other a bit of a blundering dolt - has been playing with CRISPR gene re-coding to try and create essentially a super soldier serum. They were testing it on rats in a space station when shit went wrong, and the serum ultimately rains down upon the Earth. Three creatures get infected, including George who is basically best friends with ex-marine The Rock. Ex-marine The Rock says he likes animals better than people but to be honest he's pretty damn good with people too. The man is full of charm. That's why he's so swoll.
When George gets gigantic, ex-marine The Rock tries to keep him calm, but the evil genius has flipped a homing beacon switch calling all the monsters to cross vast distances to convene on their headquarters in Chicago (what is this plan??!!??) and they are mindlessly compelled to do so. Along the way the army tries to take them out to no avail, so it's up to ex-marine The Rock and gene scientist Naomi Harris to go there and try and cancel the homing beacon and hopefully convince George to fight the wolf and lizard. Also, Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays a government guy who seems like an asshole at first but is totally charming with his weird accent and is actually mostly a decent guy trying to do the right thing. But he's generally extraneous. Oh and Joe Manganiello is in here as a cocky-as-shit military guy who tries to take out the wolf and loses big time. I think this was supposed to be a big Deep Blue Sea style twist but my surprise equated to a meager "huh".
The film is kind of goofy but mostly in the right ways. Malin Akerman's evil corporate person is all cliche and she plays right into all of them. It's not quite a comedic performance but almost. Her brother, played by Jake Lacy, meanwhile, is really quite damn funny in his semi-clueless, incompetent, pompous shitbag role. Playing a dumb guy who thinks he's smart is tricky and he nails it.
But really what are people there for? To watch giant monsters destroy Chicago (oh Chi-town, a favourite target for destruction, second only to San Fran). And yeah, they trash it but good. It's not ugly CGI madness like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but also not much different. There's a really great building falling over sequence which should come with a 9-11 trigger warning. Also George the albino gorilla is pretty awesome, and has a great rapport with The Rock.
In all both are not great movies but have charm to spare and are decent time passers. Jumanji 2 has a great cast that keeps it afloat, while Rampage has just enough little likeable bits to keep one interested as long as you don't think too much about it. And The Rock is never not watchable or likeable in these. I should also note I watched both of these with my 9-year-old daughter and they both seemed ok for this age. A bit of language in the former and violence in the latter but nothing she hasn't seen in a Marvel movie. Kids these days, grow up so fast.
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