Rampage is big, bad, stupid, and surprisingly enough, a bit fun. The film is based on the 1986 Midway Games arcade game by the same name.

You remember, the one where you put the coin in the arcade machine to play as a giant gorilla, a giant lizard monster or a giant werewolf and proceeded to destroy skyscrapers, helicopters, tanks, police cars and ate people until you were finally stopped! The main difference between the game and the film is that while in the game the monsters had mutated from humans, in the cinematic iteration they are simply giant animals that mutated thanks to a gene manipulating pathogen.

The action here works because the film understands why you go to monster films, and that’s to see the monsters. The special effects are mostly good, though some, including an iffy giant wolf leaping scene, are barely acceptable at best.

Rampage is the kind of film that benefits from the energy of an audience

The monsters fight each other, fight humans, destroy giant pieces of architecture, and cause casualties, and there is enough creativity and amusement here for you to justify the ticket fees and the hard-earned rupees you shelled out for the popcorn in what is undoubtedly a popcorn film. This is the sort of flick that benefits from the energy of an audience, and the packed cinema I saw it in was there to have a good time and had knowingly FedExed their brains somewhere else for they knew they hadn’t come to watch a Shakespearean play.

The case for Rampage being good, mindless entertainment is helped by the fact that it stars Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who brings all of his charm and self-depreciating humour to play in yet another partnership with the director, Brad Peyton. He plays Davis Okoye, the sort of silly flawless action hero you’d expect from an old-school video game. Okoye is an ex-US Army Special Forces soldier-turned-head of an anti-poaching unit-turned-San Diego primatologist. It’s the sort of character a teenager would write, though it works fine for a film like this. The other charming performance comes from Jeffrey Dean Morgan who plays a government agent. Essentially, he plays Negan from The Walking Dead. I am pretty sure that was the extent of Brad Peyton’s direction: “Just be Negan, please.”

The case for Rampage being good mindless entertainment is helped by the fact that it stars Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who brings all of his charm and self-depreciating humour to play in yet another partnership with director, Brad Peyton.

Now that I’ve told you what works in Rampage, it’s time to explore the bad and the stupid, of which there is plenty. There is no subtle way to say this: the writing here is awful. It’s especially disappointing when you consider that four writers put together this magnum opus. Granted, it was a challenge to write a film based on an old video game which barely had a story, but some of the dialogue, characterisation, pacing and narrative threads are so amateurish and inconsistent that it felt like the writers were phoning it in. Nothing exemplifies this more than the series of unfunny jokes or the villains who made less sense than the bad guys from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

And while The Rock and Morgan bring their A-game, the rest of the cast clearly have trouble delivering convincing performances. For instance, the talented Naomie Harris who plays a genetic engineer and is an award-winning actress, has an expression that says “I can’t believe I am in this movie” throughout. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the three CGI monsters come across as more human than the human cast itself, which — depending on what you want from this film — may not be a completely bad thing.

Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence, action and destruction, brief language, and crude gestures

Published in Dawn, ICON, April 22nd, 2018