Dwayne Johnson became the biggest, most marketable and highest-paid star in the industry by relying entirely on the strength of his personal brand, which has worked wonders for him over the last two decades. Not all of his movies are what you would call classics, but they tend to do solid business at the box office despite many of them being completely indistinguishable from each other.
If you were asked to name one Dwayne Johnson film where he played a character in a beige shirt who was caught in a race against time to avoid a catastrophic event while forced to battle various CGI critters, would you choose Race to Witch Mountain, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, sequel The Next Level, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island or Rampage?
Similarly, if you had to pick one of his star vehicles that saw him cast as a charismatic hero with some sort of military or law enforcement expertise, you’d be spoiled for choice with four Fast and Furious movies, Hobbs & Shaw, The Rundown, Walking Tall, Empire State, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Central Intelligence, San Andreas or even next year’s Red Notice available to pick from.
One of the 48 year-old’s most disappointing efforts, though, which isn’t listed above, has found itself as the latest terrible actioner to gain a huge audience on Netflix, with Skyscraper currently the sixth most-watched title on the streaming service. The idea of Johnson tackling a cross between Die Hard and The Towering Inferno sounds like a home run on paper, but the execution was way off.
Skyscraper had bags of potential, but squandered it all in a series of painfully unconvincing set pieces far too reliant on subpar visual effects, but nonetheless remains a textbook example of the sort of derivative action thriller that people can watch without any complaints, before immediately forgetting all about it as soon as the credits roll.