Dwayne Johnson didn’t become the biggest, most popular and highest-paid movie star in the world by taking risks, and the 48 year-old has built his brand on not having to deviate too far from his established screen persona, although sometimes you wish he’d branch out a little bit to explore some new territory.
If you’ve seen one Dwayne Johnson movie, chances are you’ve seem them all. He can generally be found wearing khaki and playing either a charismatic law enforcement agent, military veteran, family man or gentle giant with a kind heart that betrays his colossal frame of some kind in action-packed summer blockbusters that are tailored to maximize his global appeal.
One of the more forgotten entries in his recent filmography is 2018’s Skyscraper, which seems ridiculous because the pitch of ‘Dwayne Johnson does Die Hard‘ is surely a guarantee of success. However, despite earning over $300 million globally, the movie was a huge disappointment at the domestic box office where it only made $68 million.
It doesn’t help that Skyscraper is far from one of the actor’s best efforts, and was obviously created specifically to cater towards Chinese audiences at the expense of even attempting to do something different with a concept we’ve seen a thousand times before. Johnson plays a “security expert who must infiltrate a burning skyscraper, 225 stories above ground, when his family is trapped inside by criminals,” and the plot plays out exactly as you’d expect.
What had the potential to be his career-defining action role instead got lost in a sea of unconvincing CGI and terrible dialogue, but Skyscraper seems to be experiencing something of a resurgence now after finding itself reaching the eighth position on Netflix’s list of the Top 10 most-watched movies around the world this week. It definitely isn’t Dwayne Johnson‘s greatest work, but people looking for disposable entertainment over the weekend can certainly do a lot worse, which presumably explains why the $125 million actioner has cracked the global Top 10.