Rampage

Rampage is a 2018 American science fiction monster film directed by Brad Peyton, loosely based on the video game series of the same name by Midway Games. The film stars Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Malin Åkerman, Joe Manganiello, Jake Lacy, Marley Shelton, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. It follows a primatologist named Davis Okoye who must team up with George, an albino gorilla who turns into a raging creature of enormous size following a rogue experiment, in order to stop an invasion of monsters.

Principal photography began in April 2017 in Chicago. The film was released in the United States on April 13, 2018 by Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line Cinema in 2D, Real D 3D and IMAX formats. It received mixed reviews from critics, with Johnson and Morgan's performances and the visual effects being praised, but the writing and faithlessness to the source material being criticized

Primatologist Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson), a man who is the head of an anti-poaching unit, finds out his beloved albino silverback gorilla friend George has been infected with a mysterious experimental gas that turns him into a giant, aggressive, and emotional unstable beast. To make matters worse, a grey wolf named Ralph and an American crocodile named Lizzie have been infected too. With the help of a discredited genetic engineer named Dr. Kate Caldwell, and the Marine elite force he must save George, stop Ralph and Lizzie from destroying most of America, and find out who mutated the animals, and most of all have a good time and make friends.

You have to give credit to a movie like Rampage for featuring a scene in which its lead character—in this case played by Dwayne Johnson—gazes upon one of its C.G.I. creations and says “you’re big shit.” That line invites a lot of easy expansions. Rampage is, it turns out, just about a bunch of big shit. And it is itself a big pile of, well, you get it. So coming right out and speaking its core truth aloud like that is reckless, but maybe respectable. I wish only that the rest of director Brad Peyton’s film had that same half-conscious moxie. An entire movie of that could be a lot of fun.

The bulk of Rampage is, alas, a slog, as passionless as I’d imagine the fandom is for the I.P. the film is based on. Some of us remember Rampage, a 1986 arcade game about generic King Kong and Godzilla types knocking down buildings, but do any of us love it? Rampage the movie doesn’t really seem to care either way, relying some on half-assed nostalgia (there’s a Rampage arcade console glimpsed in the background of the villain’s office, about as lazily direct a nod as could be) but mostly hoping that audiences will thrill to the movie’s wan energy because it’s a Dwayne Johnson vehicle, and he’s basically the biggest movie star there is right now.

Which is true. Johnson ended 2017 and began 2018 with Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, an action comedy that has made nearly a billion dollars worldwide and is the latest in a nearly unbroken (Baywatch, whoops) string of hits. He’s a big, bankable name. And yet as Rampage proves, his charisma can only take him—and a movie—so far. Rampage dumps Johnson into a blank role and figures that’s enough to make things work. “It’s The Rock, doin’ stuff!” Yeah, sure, it is The Rock doing stuff. But it’s stuff we’ve seen him do before, in better movies. Rampage probably needed more of a built-in joke to put Johnson to good use, some device or wink that gestured toward the obviousness of his casting. That never arrives, and so we get a Johnson performance that’s about as bored as we are watching the movie.

Johnson plays Davis Okoye, a former special ops Army guy turned primatologist who’s tasked with saving the world—or at least Chicago—when a mysterious substance from a top-secret space-station laboratory crashes to Earth and makes oversized monsters out of a Wyoming wolf, a Florida gator, and a beloved albino gorilla named George, who is also Davis's best friend. Rampage starts off as a kind of workplace comedy, with Davis training two young scientists (Breanne Hill and Jack Quaid) who seemed destined to hook up by the end of the movie, and palling around with a dorky sidekick played by P.J. Byrne. We figure that when the ape gets big, all that stuff will travel along on the adventure.