Die Hard was, is, and always will be one of the greatest action movies that’s ever been made, and the exact same sentiment applies to The Towering Inferno in the disaster genre, so what happens when you combine the two and throw the biggest star on the planet right into the middle? Disappointingly, the answer is Skyscraper.
Dwayne Johnson doing his best John McClane impression in a $125 million blockbuster was admittedly an intoxicating prospect on the surface, but to say the end product left a lot to be desired would be drastically under-selling it, because there is quite literally no front on which the film succeeded.
The high concept was decent enough, but it was undercut by some terrible CGI and unconvincing green screen backdrops that didn’t so much stretch the suspension of disbelief and tear it into a thousand tiny little pieces. Critics and audiences alike were left cold, and Skyscraper would have flopped hard were it not for a strong showing in China, which contributed over 25 percent of the movie’s total $304 million take at the box office.
Of course, at the end of the day it’s still The Rock headlining a ridiculous slab of big budget escapism, so Skyscraper‘s return to the Netflix library has inevitably seen it rocket back to the top of the rankings. Per FlixPatrol, Red Notice director Rawson Marshall Thurber’s dud is dangling precariously on the Top 10 in 57 countries around the world, good enough to see it lord above the competition as the platform’s third most-watched feature on a global level.