Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars
Bottom Line: An incredibly stupid movie. Still lots of fun, though. Credit The Rock and a CGI gorilla. Oh, and the destruction of Chicago.
There is one thing you should know going into the theaters to see “Rampage”: There is more stupid in this one movie to fill up tens or hundreds of movies. How I came to still enjoy this movie is a bit beyond me, but I left the theater both laughing at its stupidity and looking back fondly at the camp and over the top acting. This isn’t even one of those “so bad it’s good” movies either. It’s more a movie where everyone seems to be in on the joke at how bad a movie it is and is just enjoying the heck out of hamming it up and somehow the formula works.
Based extremely loosely on the 80s arcade game of the same name, “Rampage” is about three poor animals who are accidentally transformed into monstrous versions of their previous self after an experiment in space (conducted, of course, by an evil corporation who can’t perform the experiments on land because they’re illegal, of course) goes awry and comes crashing down to Earth and miraculously spreads across 3000 miles of the United States depositing a sealed container that can easily withstand both reentry and crashing to the earth without being destroyed, but somehow pop open when the animals look at them funny. Yes, true to the arcade game, those animals are a gorilla, a wolf, and an alligator. No, not true to the arcade game, The Rock does not turn into the gorilla and there are zero scenes of him reducing down from super-gorilla form to naked man slinking off the side of the screen. More’s the pity. That would have been hilarious. No, Dwayne Johnson is a primatologist who hates humans and loves animals and takes care of the albino gorilla named, yes, George. It is George who turns into the monster. For reasons that also make no sense, the evil corporation people lure the monsters to Chicago in a way that also makes no sense so that they can gloriously make rubble out of downtown Chicago.
For fans of “The Walking Dead”, first off, I pity you. Second, you’ll be happy to see that Negan makes an appearance and you get a lot of his back story which was completely missing from the show. It turns out that before he came to rule an enclave in a zombie apocalypsed wasteland, he was an agent in a secret governmental group who, to quote Negan, “When science shits the bed, I’m the one they call to change the sheets.” From this, I can only surmise that Negan knew much more about the zombie apocalypse than he ever led on. Perhaps that knowledge led him to who he would ultimately become…
Yes, I know that wasn’t really Negan. No, there really isn’t any way to tell the difference between Jeffery Dean Morgan’s portrayal of Negan vs his portrayal of Agent Harvey Russell besides the name.
No, spilling words onto a blog has not helped me understand why I liked this movie. Just know that it’s fun and ridiculous and you get to see Chicago get destroyed. Including the Willis Tower! I have decided that it is ok to call it the Willis Tower if and only if it is getting destroyed. Otherwise, it remains the Sears Tower.