Skyscraper (dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber)

"Big dumb fun" doesn't come much more guaranteed than in the latest Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson action staple. The former "World Wrestling Entertainment" superstar is quite rightly the world's leading box-officer star; a result of his brooding charisma, die-hard work ethic and astute career choices.

His latest is perhaps his most derivative feature. Teaming up with director Rawson Marshall Thurber, with whom he worked on the much underrated "Central Intelligence", here's a hopelessly nonsensical disaster movie with one flush eye on the Chinese market that is nothing if not riotously enjoyable.

Following on from the success of the terrific "Rampage", Johnson plays Will Sawyer, a former FBI hostage negotiator now turned safety assessor. Moving from Minnesota to Hong Kong some years after loosing his leg in a botched hostage situation, Sawyer is sent to the Asian landscape to run diagnostics on a newly opened skyscraper called "The Pearl", a newly commissioned building reported to be the highest in the world. Chief among the innovators is Zhao Long Ji (Inception's Chin Han), who hopes to get the upper-half of the building signed off before the big opening.

And Sawyer is more than just the mere hired help. It's clear he knows how to protect himself, and things that he holds most dear - none more than wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) and kids Henry (Noah Cottrell) and Georgia (McKenna Roberts). Though a paraplegic, Sawyer doesn't feel sorry for himself, and uses his disability to fuel his desire to be successful. But things soon turn sour. When Sawyer is tasked with running diagnostics on the buildings off-site maintenance center, he leaves his doting wife and children to their own devices - just as euro-accented goons turn up and set the building on-fire.

Anyone expecting a nuanced and worthy character drama here will no doubt be disappointed, as Thurber's direction and his script are merely vehicles for the over-the-top action set pieces, not limited to our hero Sawyer jumping from a crane in a mind-boggling extended sequence. Yet as Johnson has done on several occasions within the last few years, the muscular star carries the success of this film despite the summer-blockbusters glaring clichéd elements. Not only is The Rock capable of injecting catharsis into the piece, as though there is only a minuscule amount of backstory though we immediately relate to his condition, but his affinity for hand-to-hand combat is second to none in Hollywood right now, and a particular set-piece with former friend Ben (Pablo Schreiber) is a prime example of this.

Few Hollywood staples would be able to get away with the derivative nature of this wildly entertaining disaster movie, yet the marketing campaign accompanying this $125m feature aims to run with it's clear parallels to other films of the genre, and thus it could be argued to be more of a nostalgic charm. "Die Hard" and "The Towering Inferno" to name but a few, though "Skyscraper" has something that neither of these films had: duct tape. A running gag throughout this perfectly pitched action vehicle is that duct tape will save the day, especially when crawling up the side of the skyscraper in an attempt to save your family. That's pretty much the best way to describe this disaster flick, and despite some convoluted plot points and strange European accents, it's nothing if not deliriously entertaining.

Rating 3.5/5