Author: Emily Yoshida / Source: Vulture
I had no idea that Rampage was based on a video game until, somewhere around the point where a giant flying wolf eats Joe Manganiello, an arcade cabinet makes an extremely conspicuous cameo in the background of the villains’ penthouse lair.
I have since learned that Rampage, a King Kong knockoff starring a trio of city-smashing mutant animals, was an arcade staple in the mid-’80s, and more importantly, one of the many properties acquired by Warner Bros. when they bought Midway Games in 2009. Nearly ten years later, the first fruit of that iconic deal has arrived on our screens, starring the Rock. It’s trash, but it’s trash with context.If you ignore its acquisition pedigree, Rampage, directed by San Andreas maestro Brad Peyton, feels like something that accidentally got sent down the wrong tube to a slightly-too-fancy casting director (Manganiello, Naomie Harris, and Malin Akerman are all here, bafflingly) and a guaranteed wide release. Despite its insistent name-checking of CRISPR gene-editing to … root the flying wolf in scientific reality, I guess … this is in fact way more SyFy than Sci-Fi, one shark short of a Sharknado. (There is a giant alligator, though.) It’s aggressively dumb, and I’d feel safe in the assumption that everyone was in on the joke if it weren’t for the absence of any good ones. (Evil biotech boss Akerman casually asking her brother “Remember that private military firm we acquired last year?” counts, maybe.
) I’m not terribly convinced that the overtly campy version of this film would be any better, but I’m very certain that this one is bad.Dwayne Johnson plays Davis Okoye, a San Diego primatology expert with a checkered past and a mistrust of humans, who has a special relationship with an albino Gorilla named George. The opening act of the film, in which we meet Davis and his band of beta sidekicks, who gush about the “kale bread” they made last night while he pacifies the beasts, is so transparently dictated by Johnson that I was tempted to feel embarrassed for him….
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