Rampage

The Ape, The Rock, and The End of the World

Early on in *Rampage*, there’s a scene where Dwayne Johnson stands in a zoo enclosure and signs to George, a massive albino gorilla. I was bracing for the usual layer of ironic detachment that modern blockbusters use to excuse their own silliness, but Johnson plays the moment with absolute, straight-faced sincerity. His massive frame actually seems to soften as he communicates with a creature he clearly likes better than most people. It’s a strange emotional foundation for a movie based on a 1980s arcade game about smashing digital buildings, but it actually works. Even when the film turns into a deafening, chaotic spectacle, it never quite loses the heart established in that quiet primate exhibit.



Director Brad Peyton and Johnson reunite here after their 2015 disaster movie *San Andreas*, and Peyton’s specific visual style is easy to spot. He has a refreshing habit of destroying cities in broad daylight, rather than hiding shaky digital effects behind the dark or torrential rain like so many other blockbusters. Watching a thirty-foot flying wolf crash into a skyscraper in the afternoon sun feels strangely honest. The pace does suffer when the script pauses for Malin Åkerman and Jake Lacy’s cartoonish corporate villains to explain the pseudo-science of CRISPR, but the film hits its stride whenever it just lets the monsters wreck things. As *Every Movie Has a Lesson* critic Don Shanahan noted, Johnson has a knack for elevating his material; here, he carries a thin premise into fun territory by refusing to act like he's above it.



You have to appreciate how Jeffrey Dean Morgan carries himself in this film. Striding in as Harvey Russell, an agent for a shadowy government branch, Morgan leans so far into a Texan swagger that he looks like he’s fighting gravity. He’s essentially playing a lawful-neutral version of his infamous *The Walking Dead* villain, Negan—all cocky hip-swings, gleaming teeth, and pearl-handled sidearms. When he and Johnson finally square off, the amount of alpha-male posturing is almost absurd, yet it fits the movie’s energy perfectly. Morgan understands exactly what frequency this film is broadcasting on. He doesn't shrink from the green-screen madness; instead, he puffs his chest out to match the scale of the giant animals.



The Chicago showdown has a sense of visceral weight that you don't always get in these movies. Glass shards fly, concrete dust fills the air, and a giant crocodile named Lizzie casually snatching helicopters out of the sky feels surprisingly heavy. There’s a great tracking shot that follows Johnson’s character as he slides through a collapsing office building, trying to pull a berserk George back to his senses. This is where the movie reveals its true self: *Rampage* is really just a story about a guy trying to save his pet. It just happens that the pet is a gorilla currently punching a crocodile in the throat. Whether that’s enough for two hours of your time depends on your appetite for spectacle. Personally, I was grinning the whole time. Cinema has room for both complex character studies and scenes where The Rock fires a grenade launcher while an ape signs a dirty joke.