Rampage film review - even shallower than the arcade game
Last year, the New York Times ran a fascinating, faintly scary story about Hollywood's intellectual property crisis. Through the lens of one producer's desperate attempt to make a film out of the mobile game Fruit Ninja, the piece explored how the major movie studios' retreat from risk of any kind had led to a market where films were vastly more likely to get made if they had some kind of recognisable licence attached - even if that property featured no characters or obvious storytelling potential. Films were being made out of old board games, toy lines, even emojis.
This, I assume, is how we have ended up with a film based on Rampage. Bally Midway's 1986 arcade hit is a game of mindless destruction in which players control three giant monsters - an ape, a werewolf, a lizard - and scale and smash up skyscrapers, reducing them to rubble for high scores. It's a gleeful inversion of King Kong and Godzilla, and of the video games they inspired like Donkey Kong. It's fondly remembered and still fun to play today, but it's hardly a crown jewel of gaming intellectual property; it was revived in the mid-90s and limped through a few sequels before disappearing once again from our screens. And it is somehow now a major motion picture starring Dwayne Johnson.
Why? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. My best guess is that Rampage was the cheapest available existing property that afforded the studio, New Line, an opportunity to reunite the trio of Johnson, director Brad Peyton and collapsing buildings that had done so well for all concerned in 2015's San Andreas. You can't really make a sequel to a film about an earthquake. You can, however, reproduce its wheeling aerial shots of crumbling masonry and hope that a little nostalgic name recognition will help mitigate the cost of making them.
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