What do Under Siege, Passenger 57, Executive Decision, Air Force One, Con Air, Cliffhanger, Speed, Sudden Death, White House Down, Olympus Has Fallen, Dwayne Johnson’s Skyscraper, and many more all have in common? That’s right; they all follow the ‘Die Hard on a….’ template that’s spawned an entire action subgenre.
None of them can hold a candle to John McTiernan’s classic, which remains perhaps the single greatest actioner to ever come out of Hollywood, but more than a few of them provide plenty of entertainment in their own right as a grizzled everyman battles against the odds in a contained location. Unfortunately, Skyscraper is not one of those movies.
The Rock headlining the glorious lovechild of Die Hard and The Towering Inferno sounds awesome on paper, but it was painfully lacking when it came to the execution. A strong showing in China was the only reason why the high concept blockbuster didn’t flop at the box office, with the reliance on shoddy CGI hugely detrimental to the finished product.
Then again, people love Dwayne Johnson, so anything he touches is guaranteed to find a sizeable audience. Even something like Skyscraper, a film so forgettable you’ll struggle to remember anything about it by the time the credits roll, has enjoyed a second life. As per FlixPatrol, it’s one of the 20 most popular titles on Netflix, which sounds about right when it’s tailor-made for lazy Friday viewing.