It’s as silly as one would expect but it’s also an undeniably giddy pleasure and, coupled with another heart-pumping, vertigo-inducing action sequence, this is where the film works best. Which brings us to the much-memed crane jump. But this is soon forgotten and the shift to all-out action figure stunting is all too sudden, Sawyer’s anxiety fading instantly despite being faced with a series of genuinely impossible missions. He’s nervous, vulnerable and, when he’s initially thrown into action, unsure on his feet. While his heroic physique is hard to downplay, Johnson does a solid job in the initial scenes of convincing us that he’s not the day-saver we would expect.

Neve Campbell and Dwayne Johnson: ‘Right from the opening scene, we’re locked into familiar, box-ticking territory.’ Photograph: Kimberley French/AP Every detail in the first act is a clumsily dropped breadcrumb to be used later on: a joke about Campbell’s character being terrible with technology, a kid’s asthma, a hi-tech tourist attraction high in the building … it’s all screenwriting 101. While it’s a far cry from actual representation for amputees on-screen (Johnson is able-bodied, after all), it’s a small step in the right direction.Įlsewhere, the script fails to make any real inroads towards that much-touted originality. The film kicks off with our hero experiencing some standard character-building trauma (as seen in Cliffhanger, Hostage, Along Came a Spider, etc), though in a somewhat unique touch it leaves our hero without a leg. Right from the opening scene, we’re locked into familiar, box-ticking territory. Even Universal has referenced this in the marketing, with posters mimicking both Die Hard and The Towering Inferno.

But using the word original in the same sentence as Skyscraper feels ill-fitting, given that it’s such a shameless regurgitation of so many other films. Even Johnson himself sub-tweeted this, selling it as some sort of scrappy underdog. Early tracking has suggested that Skyscraper will become the year’s biggest original hit, given that it’s a rare film with a $100m-plus budget that isn’t a sequel, a reboot, a remake or based on a TV show, a comic, a video game, a tweet or a discarded piece of food.

Fire axe from skyscraper movie