Rampage

Rampage is one of those rare video games that has actually inspired a good movie. The title character in Wreck-It Ralph is named after a giant wolf that tears up cities as it fights off aerial attacks.

Sadly, the new movie adapted from the 1986 arcade game isn't as fun as the game itself. At times it almost made me regret that I used to say there's nothing more tedious than watching someone else play a video game because watching director Brad Peyton plagiarize himself may be.

Much of the destruction in Rampage copies the mayhem from Peyton's 2015 movie San Andreas. Watching major metropolitan areas leveled by monsters ought to be scary or exhilarating. Instead, it's numbing. After a few buildings fall, it's like watching a controlled demolition with gigantic mutants instead of explosives.

An army of screenwriters has tried to shoehorn a simple game into a workable story, and Rampage often feels as if a committee assembled it blindfolded. The pieces simply don't fit, and when one of the creatures from the game decimates a Dave & Buster's, one wonders if it's a way the filmmakers have punished themselves for ruining the arcade experience.

As with the game, there's a gorilla named George (played in motion capture by Jason Liles). His best friend is Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson), a human primatologist who communicates with him through sign language at the San Diego Zoo. While it might have been fun to watch The Rock use American Sign Language to interact with the ape, most of the gestures he and Johnson exchange don't require an interpreter to understand.

George loves using his middle finger.

When a satellite crashes to the earth, it releases a pathogen that turns George, Davis and a mutated alligator named Lizzie into aggressive, gigantic, mutated creatures that take lives and destroy property.

That said, Rampage actually has the makings of an enjoyable creature feature. Watching Johnson interact with George is touching. Primatologists often talk about the apes they've gotten to know as if they are human, and it might have been fun to see most of the film consisting of Johnson and George fighting aliens or other larger-than-life villains.

Instead, the corporate greedheads (Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy) who commissioned the bug that turned innocent critters into weapons of mass destruction send a signal to the monsters so they'll converge in Chicago. Even by the standards of monster movies, that seems pretty dumb.

Rampage has the silliness of a movie from The Asylum, the studio that has given us such outlandishly rendered cheese as the Sharknado series, with a much bigger budget. The creatures look far more lifelike here, but amusingly surreal images (like Ian Ziering carving his way out of a shark as if the fish is giving birth to him) are in short supply.

The creatures leave behind almost as much product placement as they do rubble. It's so forced that a console of the original game is clearly visible in the first 10 minutes.

MovieStyle on 04/13/2018